Category Archives: DIRECT eZine

“I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of here during the course of this debate. ISIL seeks to exploit the idea that there is a war between Islam and the West, and when you start seeing individuals in positions of responsibility, suggesting that Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land, that feeds the ISIL narrative. It’s counterproductive, and it needs to stop.”— President Obama, criticizing the GOP presidential candidates for their rhetoric about Syrian refugees.

“France will remain a country of freedom.” — French President Francois Hollande defending his decision to honor a commitment to accept migrants and refugees despite Friday’s deadly terrorist attacks in Paris. 11/18/15

“Instead of using this tragedy to scapegoat all refugees, I call upon our public officials to work together to end the Syrian conflict peacefully so the close to 4 million Syrian refugees can return to their country and rebuild their homes. Until that goal is achieved, we must work with the world community to provide safe haven to vulnerable and deserving refugees who are simply attempting to survive.” — The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops 11/17/15

“I would bomb the s— out of them. I would just bomb those suckers. And that’s right: I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries. I would blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left.” — Donald Trump, saying, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do.”

“All our prayers are with the people of France tonight. We must stand side-by-side every step of the way with France and our allies around the world to wage and win the struggle against terrorism and violent extremism. Even in this darkest night, Paris remains the City of Light. No terrorist attack will ever dim the spirit of the French people or our common commitment to the democratic values we share.” — Hillary Clinton urging America to stand with the French “to wage and win the struggle against terrorism and violent extremism.”

“Slamming the door in their faces would be a betrayal of our values. … Many of these refugees are the victims of terrorism themselves. That’s what they’re fleeing. … Our nations can welcome refugees who are desperately seeking safety and ensure our own security. We can and must do both.” — President Obama at the G20 summit in Turkey on Monday on the Syrian refugees.

“The one who is responsible for the attacks in Paris cannot be put on equal footing with refugees, with asylum seekers, and with displaced people. He is a criminal, and not a refugee. And I would like to invite those in Europe who are trying to change the migration agenda we have adopted to be serious about this and not give in to these basic reactions.” — European Commission President Juncker 11/15/15

“We haven’t come up with an exact number yet, but it will not be as high as the number under Dwight D. Eisenhower, which was 90 percent. I’m not that much of a socialist compared to Eisenhower.” — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on his proposal to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

“Before the Paris horror, ISIS was killing Muslims on a daily basis. We Muslims despise these crazy people more than anyone else does.” — Dean Obeidallah 11.16.15

“Now to me, that was us stepping in a trap because we should have known that she (Hillary) was going to go on and just stall, debate, filibuster, on these answers to make it go as long as possible, so we would look cruel.” –House Select Committee On Benghazi member Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R). 11/12/15

The National Rifle Association has stood in the way of legislation that is designed to prohibit terrorists from purchasing firearms legally, and that obstructionism goes back to 2007.” — The Daily Kos, noting that one the NRA’s arguments is that terrorists will just acquire firearms illegally, so such a law would only hurt “law-abiding citizens.” The gun lobby also trots out its standard rap about this kind of legislation being “sponsored by gun-control extremists.” 11/17/15

1. The Borowitz Report: Trump’s Focus on Muslims Distracting Him from Campaign Against Mexicans, Supporters Fear

There are growing fears among supporters of the Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump that his new focus on Muslims is distracting him from his campaign against Mexicans.

After the billionaire said he would consider shutting down mosques if he were President, supporters expressed concern that such signature proposals as a wall with Mexico and mass deportations were being lost in the shuffle.

Trump supporter, Harland Dorrinson, agreed. “Shutting down the mosques is a great idea, sure, but he shouldn’t do that if it’s going to divert resources from forcibly deporting eleven million immigrants,” he said. “I would be very sad to see that happen.”

But Tracy Klugian, a die-hard Trump volunteer who is working for his campaign in Iowa, called such criticism of her candidate “misguided.” “You don’t get to be a successful businessman like Donald Trump without being able to multitask,” she said. Read more at http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/

2. The Late Show with Stephen ColbertThe 4th GOP Debate Was A Thing That Happened

– “We are a country that is being beaten on every front economically, militarily.” — Donald Trump
– “The most important question any of us can have is how do we get the economy growing?”How do we bring back economic growth?” — Ted Cruz
– “We have to take our government back ecause innovation and entrepreneurship is crushed by the crushing load of a 73,000 page tax code” and “Obamacare isn’t helping anyone.” — Carly Fiorina,
– “What we are going through in this country is not simply an economic downturn. We are living through a massive economic transformation.” — Marco Rubio. http://www.vox.com/2015/11/13/9727132/republicans-economy

VERSUS

They would be surprised to find that unemployment is at 5 percent, America’s recovery from the financial crisis has outpaced that of other developed nations, the percentage of uninsured Americans has been plummeting even as Obamacare has cost less than expected, and there’s so much money flowing into new ideas and firms in the tech industry that observers are worried about a second tech bubble. — Ezra Klein in Vox. 11/13/15

“[T]hey do not hate us because we have military assets in the Middle East. They hate us because of our values. They hate us because young girls here go to school. They hate us because women drive. They hate us because we have freedom of speech, because we have diversity in our religious beliefs. They hate us because we’re a tolerant society.” — Marco Rubio 11/15/15

VERSUS

“This is simply false. The Islamic State may hate tolerance, liberty, and women’s rights. But that’s not why its cadres attacked Paris. … America’s domestic freedoms, precious as they are, don’t have much to do with it.” — Peter Beinart in the Atlantic 11/15/15

“I have several sources that I’ve got material from, I’m surprised my sources are better than theirs.” — Ben Carsonabout the White House for dismissing his claims that China is moving into Syria, saying his sources are clearly better than those of the U.S. government

VERSUS

“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East.” — Duane R. Clarridge, a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security 11/17/15

On Monday, Gov. Chris Christie vetoed the Democracy Act — preventing New Jersey from becoming the third state, after Oregon and California, to adopt automatic registration in 2015. The Democracy Act also would have given voters the opportunity to register and update their information online, and created two weeks of in-person early voting, among other reforms. Together, they would have boosted registration rates, cleaned up the rolls, saved money, and made voting more convenient. 11/10/15 http://www.brennancenter.org/blog/christie-misses-golden-opportunity-garden-state

Less than three months before the kickoff Iowa caucuses, there is growing anxiety bordering on panic among Republican elites about the dominance and durability of Donald Trump and Ben Carson and widespread bewilderment over how to defeat them.

Party leaders and donors fear that nominating either man would have negative ramifications for the GOP ticket up and down the ballot, virtually ensuring a Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency and increasing the odds that the Senate falls into Democratic hands.

“California governor Jerry Brown signed a controversial new bill allowing assisted suicide. Yeah. Just in time for Lakers season.” –Conan O’Brien

“I read that Donald Trump’s hotel chain may have experienced a data breach that may have exposed people’s debit and credit card information to hackers for more than a year. When asked how he planned on fixing the situation, Trump was like, ‘I’m going to build a huge firewall.'” –Jimmy Fallon

“I do think Donald Trump is honest in his own way. He is honestly an egomaniacal billionaire.” –Stephen Colbert

“Much to the dismay of many Republicans, a new report said Donald Trump is still leading in the polls, and one voter was quoted as saying, ‘Unfortunately, I’m leaning toward Trump.’ Even worse, that voter was Jeb Bush.” –Jimmy Fallon

“Donald Trump’s wife Melania just gave an interview where she said their 9-year-old son Barron wants to grow up to be a golfer, a businessman, and a pilot. When Melania told him that’s very unlikely to happen, he replied, ‘Dad’s in first place for president, anything can happen.'” –Jimmy Fallon

“Ben Carson talks like he forgot he had a press conference and just took a load of Benadryl. This guy is a retired surgeon. Apparently, instead of giving his patients anesthesia, he just talked to them until they passed out.” –James Corden

“Ben Carson has made a lot of controversial statements. He’s said prison turns people gay and that Obamacare is the worst thing to happen to our country since slavery. And that was just to his waitress at breakfast.” –James Corden

“This is what happens when you give Donald Trump attention: Everyone else seems reasonable in comparison. Ben Carson is over here saying ‘You’re Hitler!’ ‘Obamacare is slavery!’ And we’re like, ‘Finally, an adult in the room!'” –James Corden

Members of the House Freedom Caucus are preparing a “Contract With America II” that would call for House votes in the first 100 days of 2016 on replacing Obamacare, overhauling entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, and repealing the estate tax.

Wall Street donors are favoring Republicans over Democrats in the 2016 campaign — a reversal from the last time Clinton ran for president when she and then-Sen. Barack Obama out-raised their GOP rivals with the financial sector’s cash.

It took just 48 hours, but the tragic terror attacks on Paris have quickly cleaved the 2016 Republican primary into a contest between those with serious foreign policy experience and those without, shifting the race, at least for now, from a campaign for the presidency to a test for commander in chief.

The disparity between candidates has been present and glaring for months, of course, but it took a backseat in a primary where experience has been akin to a dirty word, and early state voters haven’t demanded great familiarity with world affairs. The question for 2016 now turns on whether foreign policy fluency and the seasoning of elected office somehow morphs into an asset, a development which could dislodge the two outsiders who are currently perched comfortably atop the polls – Donald Trump and Ben Carson – and reorder the race. 11/15/15 http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/paris-attacks-2016-republicans-215913#ixzz3rcJKZm2f

The policy debates in the two primary races seem like they’re two countries apart, let alone two parties. The reason: Both the Democratic and Republican primary electorates simply don’t look a lot like the electorate at large. To wit:

The Democratic primary electorate is 62 percent white and 38 percent non-white, while the electorate overall is 72 percent white and 26 percent non-white. And half of Democrats planning to vote in the primaries say they consider themselves liberal, while only about quarter of those who will cast a general election vote next November say the same. 11/13/15 http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/first-read-donald-trump-goes-rails-n462816

The near future may be playing out in the stress nightmares of the Republican establishment. Rubio eliminates Bush on age, polish, and the value of a last name. Cruz eliminates Rubio based on the Florida senator’s support of amnesty. And suddenly, the deepest field in recent history has collapsed into Trump, Carson, Cruz, and some also-rans. 11/16/15 http://theweek.com/articles/588673/gops-nightmare-scenario-real

OPINION

1. Stanley B. Greenberg: Why 2016 could be shattering for Republicans

The United States is emerging as racially blended, immigrant, multinational and multilingual — accelerating the growth of a new majority coalition of racial minorities, single women, millennials and seculars. Together, these groups formed 51 percent of the electorate in 2012, but our analysis of census survey data and exit poll projections indicates that they will comprise fully 63 percent in 2016. With these growing groups each supporting Hillary Clinton by more than 2 to 1 in today’s polls, it is fair to say that the United States has reached an electoral tipping point.

This is evident in the shrinking proportion of people who think of themselves as conservative. When Republicans challenged President Obama in the off-year elections of 2010, 46 percent of the country was conservative at the high point. That figure is now 37 percent.

Imagine a police sketch artist drawing a picture of Hillary Clinton based only on descriptions from the Republicans at the Fox Business Network debates on Tuesday night. The sketch would be unappealing, obviously, but also weird and contradictory. According to the collective wisdom of the GOP crowd, Clinton is a power-mad monster who is nearly unstoppable, but she’s also weak. She is afraid of debating Republicans, but Republican debates are making her stronger. She is a hard leftist who hasn’t been shaken from her mission to drive America into socialism, but also a flip-flopper who only recently began capitulating to the left. At one point in the undercard debate, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal summed up the theme: “Look, we all agree Hillary Clinton is bad.” But how is she bad?

She is woman with no ideas except for bad ones: Clinton has no ideas (Rubio: “The political left has no ideas about the future”). Except for one: single-payer health care (Christie: “She will completely nationalize the federal health care system”).

A criminal-ish politician: Christie, in particular, painted Clinton with a tint of criminality. Christie said being governor of a blue state made him better equipped to win nationally, but he seemed to think his time as a U.S. attorney was more appealing; four times, he said some version of the idea that he would be best at “prosecuting” her.

A foreign-policy failure who agrees with Republicans on foreign policy: Clinton is trembling and weak on foreign policy. (Bush: “This president, and Hillary Clinton both, do not believe the United States has a leadership role to play.” Rubio: “Around the world, every day brings news of a new humiliation for America—many the … direct consequence of decisions made when Hillary Clinton was the secretary of state.” Christie: “Remember why we’re in the position we’re in with China, because of an absolutely weak and feckless foreign policy that was engineered by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.”) At the same time, she agrees with many Republicans about what to do with the gravest international crisis, in Syria (Paul: “The idea of a no-fly zone, realize that this is also something that Hillary Clinton agrees with several on our side with…”).

A big spender who is also stingy: She wants to tax Americans to death (Christie: “Hillary Clinton’s coming for your wallet”). But she won’t spend the cash to build up some of the biggest government expenses (Fiorina: “Imagine a Clinton presidency. Our military will continue to deteriorate. Our veterans will not be cared for”).

A socialist who loves Wall Street: Clinton is a socialist (Christie: “What Hillary Clinton is talking about doing, if she’s president of the United States, is to make sure that the government gets even more involved in the economy, even more involved in making choices for everybody”) who is screwing up the financial sector by backing Dodd-Frank, which is unpopular on Wall Street (Bush: “This vast overreach has created a huge problem for our country, and Hillary Clinton wants to double down on that”). But she’s also in the pocket of Wall Street (Cruz: “Hillary Clinton embodies the cronyism of Washington.” By contrast, Cruz said he would go after the Wall Street criminals of the financial crisis.).

It gets worse. Clinton wants to regulate the economy to death (Carson: “Even for the average person, every single regulation costs money. … Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton won’t tell you that that’s the thing that’s really hurting middle class in the core. They’ll say it’s the rich, take their money, but that won’t help”). But she has not backed the right regulations (Bush: “What we ought to do is raise the capital requirements so banks aren’t too big to fail”).

Their bizarrely contradictory portrait of Clinton points to what’s confusing in the Republicans’ own message. They know Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are on the other team; what they don’t know is why the GOP team is better or more noble, or what exactly binds it together. They can’t agree on what parts of the old GOP platform should be thrown out—Santorum says Republicans should pander less to business owners than to the people who work for them, Paul suggests ditching some social conservatism and hawkish foreign policy, Bush says lose the hostility to immigrants, and Trump says cut entitlements. But they do agree on what to keep: being against whatever Clinton is for. And whoever she is. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123430/hillary-clinton-living-inside-gop-brain

“WE HAVE a country that’s going to hell.” So pronounced Donald Trump, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, at Tuesday night’s debate. If Mr. Trump thinks that now, it’s likely many Americans would come to agree with him were they to see the economic and social upheaval unleashed in carrying out his plan to forcibly deport more than 11 million undocumented immigrants, a major portion of whom are employed, have lived in the United States 15 years or more and have children and other relatives who are U.S. citizens.

Mr. Trump, who has stirred up so much enthusiasm for mass deportations, is now offering what he evidently regards as an exemplary template: the far more modest but still massively cruel round-’em-up-and-throw-’em-out program carried out, mainly in the summer of 1954, under the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Not one of them can win, but one must. That’s the paradox of the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, fast becoming the signature event in the history of black comedy.

Conventional wisdom says that with the primaries and caucuses rapidly approaching, front-running nuts Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson must soon give way to the “real” candidates. But behind Trump and Carson is just more abyss. As I found out on a recent trip to New Hampshire, the rest of the field is either just as crazy or as dangerous as the current poll leaders, or too bumbling to win.

Disaster could be averted if Americans on both the left and the right suddenly decide to be more mature about this, neither backing obvious mental incompetents, nor snickering about those who do. But that doesn’t seem probable.

Somehow, my friends on the right don’t seem to hear anything troubling, anything intellectually offensive emanating from the mouths of the Republican candidates. And I just don’t get it.

I don’t just mean the obvious stuff. You know, the unprovoked and petty anti-intellectualism of Marco Rubio denigrating philosophers by contrasting them unfavorably to welders (and presumably people who work at other skilled trades as well). Or Rand Paul’s nonsensical, conspiratorial musings about the Federal Reserve. Or Donald Trump’s xenophobic promises to build a 2,000-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexican border and round up and deport eleven million undocumented immigrants. (If they’re undocumented, how will we find them? House to house sweeps by armed agents of the state through poor and heavily Latino neighborhoods? That’s either absurdly unfeasible, as Jeb Bush and John Kasich pointed out, or a program for American fascism.)

Like millions of people, I’ve been obsessively following the news from Paris, putting aside other things to focus on the horror. It’s the natural human reaction. But let’s be clear: it’s also the reaction the terrorists want. And that’s something not everyone seems to understand.

Take, for example, Jeb Bush’s declaration that “this is an organized attempt to destroy Western civilization.” No, it isn’t. It’s an organized attempt to sow panic, which isn’t at all the same thing. And remarks like that, which blur that distinction and make terrorists seem more powerful than they are, just help the jihadists’ cause.

Think, for a moment, about what France is and what it represents. It has its problems — what nation doesn’t? — but it’s a robust democracy with a deep well of popular legitimacy. Its defense budget is small compared with ours, but it nonetheless retains a powerful military, and has the resources to make that military much stronger if it chooses. (France’s economy is around 20 times the size of Syria’s.) France is not going to be conquered by ISIS, now or ever. Destroy Western civilization? Not a chance.

So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.

The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire. And it’s crucial to realize that there are multiple ways the response can go wrong.

Carson’s virtues are starting to crack under pressure. Carson’s story of religious transformation, which has gone from personal testimony to bookable persona is under question. And, boy, did he suddenly become prickly and defensive. It’s bonkers that Carson and the media are debating not only whether he lied about getting admitted to West Point, but also about whether he attempted to stab a childhood friend — and Carson is the one arguing that he did! This is sketch comedy, not a campaign. And as his biography continues to get shredded, it will become a farce.

Carson is diverting monetary, emotional, and organizational resources away from the real long-term work of evangelical politics. He has no ideas to offer his party, which is in need of them. He has no political leadership skills for a culture that is desperate for them. He is pulling evangelical influence and resources away from candidates who can win, which ultimately enhances the grip of the more secular, more liberal Republican establishment. This is political malpractice. http://theweek.com/articles/587452/ben-carson-political-malpractice

8. William Falk: The death of the swing voter

Here’s a strange thought to chew on a year before the presidential election: The votes of 95 percent of Americans likely to cast ballots are already determined. People who lean conservative will vote for any Republican who emerges from the scrum (with the possible exception of the divisive Donald Trump). Ditto for people who lean liberal. New research by Michigan State political scientist Corwin Smidt confirms that the percentage of voters who are truly “independent,” swinging from party to party, has plunged from 15 percent in the 1960s to just 5 percent today. Crossing over party lines to vote for the other tribe’s presidential candidate has become unimaginable. As Jonathan Chait put it this week at New York: “The dominant fact of American politics is that nobody is changing their mind about anything.”

It wasn’t always this way. For much of the latter half of the 20th century, there were liberal-leaning Republicans and conservative-leaning Democrats. It was not impossible to find common ground. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both actively sought the votes of people who traditionally vote for the other party, and enjoyed great popularity partly as a result. But since 2004, polarization on immigration, climate change, abortion, religion, and social issues has become so acute that every presidential election seems to represent a major turning point, with the very definition of our nation at stake. Polls suggest that the gulf between the two parties is actually widening. Republicans loathe Hillary Clinton as much as they do Barack Obama; Democrats see Trump and Ben Carson as wackos and frauds, and have only slightly less contempt for the rest of the field. So here’s a safe if depressing prediction: The new president John Roberts swears in on Jan. 20, 2017, will be very quickly despised and distrusted by roughly 45 percent of the nation. Is this a democracy, or a dysfunctional family? 11/13/15 http://theweek.com/articles/588492/death-swing-voter

9. David Brooks: The G.O.P. at an Immigration Crossroads

It’s no exaggeration to say that the next six months will determine the viability of the Republican Party. The demographics of this country are changing. This will be the last presidential election cycle in which the G.O.P., in its current form, has even a shot at winning the White House. And so the large question Republicans must ask themselves is: Are we as a party willing to champion the new America that is inexorably rising around us, or are we the receding roar of an old America that is never coming back?

Within that large question the G.O.P. will have to face several other questions.

The first is: How is 21st-century America going to view outsiders? For Republicans in the Donald Trump camp, the metaphor is very clear: A wall. Outsiders are a threat and a wall will keep them out.

The second question Republicans have to ask is: Can the party see reality? The great Victorian critic John Ruskin once wrote: “The more I think of it I find this conclusion more impressed upon me — that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”

In the wake of the Paris attacks, more than two dozen governors—all Republicans, except for New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan, a Democrat—announced they did not want to have any Syrian refugees darken their states. One would-be governor, the desperate David Vitter, lost no time in cutting a negative attack ad trying to make it look like President Obama was intentionally importing terrorists to Louisiana. Folding to fear-mongering apparently seems like good politics in 2015. It will look awful in a few decades.

The way we will win this long war is not through military means alone, though that is an essential component (and it is ridiculous that the city of Raqqa has been allowed to solidify its role as the ISIS capital for so long). Ultimately, we will succeed by showing that we are different and bigger and better than the “us versus them” stereotypes that terrorists so desperately want the Arab street to believe.

That requires us living up to our best traditions, not solidifying our worst fears. And for those governors and presidential candidates who would seek to turn away refugees from ISIS, I’d recommend that they reacquaint themselves with the poem written by Emma Lazarus on the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me/I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

That is the spirit of Liberty. All the reflexive campaign rhetoric about America being a beacon of freedom is now being put to the test. We should screen refugees for security and then welcome them in, letting the process of assimilation work without apology.

It was inevitable that the terrorism attacks in Paris last week would echo quickly through the U.S. presidential campaign. Given the stream of nativist rhetoric already out there, it was also inevitable that some politicians’ responses would be highly objectionable, beginning with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s assertion that the United States should accept only Christian refugees from the Syrian conflict. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush sounded a similar note, calling for special efforts to protect Christians in the region; never mind that Islamic State jihadists target fellow Muslims with just as much viciousness.

It’s preposterous that a serious contender for the presidency of the U.S. would bar war refugee status based on someone’s religion. And the suggestion by GOP candidate Ben Carson that the U.S. bar all Syrian refugees for fear that a “sleeper” terrorist might slip in is an emotional, and ill-conceived, overreaction, as are pledges by several Republican governors to resist efforts to resettle refugees in their states.

This site contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use,’ you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. “Go to Original” links are provided as a convenience to allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “Go to Original” links.

His only memorable moment came when he bragged about how well his fantasy-football team was doing—“Gronkowski is still going strong!”—better, it seems, than his fantasy Presidential campaign.”– AMY DAVIDSON in the New Yorker

“Why shouldn’t he [resign]? He hates the Senate. Why should the taxpayers of this country and people of Florida put up with having only one senator? Doesn’t seem fair to me.” — Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) 10/29/15

“I just can’t tell you how pissed off I am. It was insanity. Obviously we had assurances that it was going to be straight up finance, which is what they do every day, and what was delivered was just nothing but a crap sandwich,” — RNC Chair Reince Priebus, railing against the CNBC Republican debate moderators 10/30/15

“The Republican primary has thus far been a festival of outlandish policy. The candidates seem to be competing to craft the tax plan that gives the largest tax cut to the rich while blowing the biggest hole in the deficit (a competition that, as of tonight, Ted Cruz appears to be winning. — Ezra Klein in Vox 10/28/15

The problem isn’t that CNBC engaged in “gotcha” questions meant to “embarass” the Republican candidates. It’s that any serious look is a fatal blow to GOP plans and proposals, which don’t deliver on promised substance. Trump can’t deport millions of immigrants; Carson can’t raise enough revenue to fund the federal government; and the “middle-class” tax plans of Bush, Rubio, and others shower most of their benefits on the rich. And as long as this is true, GOP candidates will have a hard time with all but the most friendly moderators. — Jamelle Bouie in Slate. 10/30/15

“Jeb is trapped in a nightmarish déjà vu. Once he was cast as the wonky one while his brother, the sparky one, slipped ahead. Now Jeb is cast as the wonky one while Marco, the sparky one, slips ahead.” — Maureen Dowd10/31/15

“They say, ‘when I talk to Putin, he’s going to straighten out.’ And then it turns out they can’t handle a bunch of CNBC moderators. If you can’t handle those guys, I don’t think the Chinese and the Russians are going to be too worried about you.” — President Obama mocking Republican presidential candidates.

“My own personal theory is that Joseph built the pyramids to store grain. Now all the archeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big if you stop and think about it. And I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time to store that much grain.” — Ben Carson during a commencement address in the late ‘90s.

1. The DAILY GRILL: The 3rd Republican debate

“Last week, Hillary Clinton went before a committee. She admitted she had sent e-mails to her family saying, ‘Hey, this attack at Benghazi was caused by Al Qaida-like elements.’ She spent over a week telling the families of those victims and the American people that it was because of a video. And yet the mainstream media is going around saying it was the greatest week in Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It was the week she got exposed as a liar.” —Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), 10/28/15

VERSUS

“Focusing just on the public statements made by Clinton — as opposed to the rest of the administration —one finds little support for Rubio’s claim that Clinton told the American people that the attacks were because of a video. She certainly spoke about the video, but always in the context of the protests that were occurring across the Middle East …. He does not have enough evidence to label Clinton a liar.” — Glenn Kessler, the Wash. Post Fact Checker. 10/30/15

“Well, it’s easy to answer. I didn’t have an involvement with them. That is total propaganda and this is what happens in our society. Total propaganda. I did a couple of speeches for them, I did speeches for other people, they were paid speeches, it is absolutely absurd to say that I had any kind of relationship with them. Do I take the product? Yes. I think it’s a good product.” — Ben Carson when asked if his judgment should be questioned in light of his involvement with Mannatech, a sketchy nutritional supplement company

VERSUS

His declarations that “I didn’t have an involvement with them” and “absurd to say that I had any kind of relationship with them” are just bald-faced lies.” JIm Geraghty in the National Review. 10/29/15

“A single mom buying groceries, she sees hamburger prices going up nearly 40 percent. She sees her costs of electricity going up. She sees her health insurance going up, and loose money is one of the major problems.” — Sen. Ted Cruz argued that loose-money policies by the Federal Reserve were pushing up the cost of living. 10/28/15

VERSUS

“BLS data shows that the average inflation rate for all goods and services since the fall of 2008 has been about 1.4 percent per year. That’s below the Fed’s longstanding target of 2 percent annual growth, and the least inflationary period in the past half-century.” — Vox 10/28/15

“It is the height of hypocrisy for Mrs. Clinton to talk about being the first woman president, when every single policy she espouses, and every single policy of President Obama has been demonstrably bad for women. Ninety-two percent of the jobs lost during Barack Obama’s first term belonged to women.” —Carly Fiorina. 10/28/15

VERSUS

“Carly Fiorina chose figures from January 2009, months into the recession, ignoring the millions of jobs lost before then, when most of the job loss fell on men.“ — PolitiFact, 10/28/15

“All that’s in that trust fund is a pile of IOUs for money they spent on something else a long time ago. And they’ve stolen from you because now they know they cannot pay these benefits and Social Security is going to be insolvent in seven to eight years.” — Gov. Christie

“Hillary Clinton put a server, an unsecure server, in her home as secretary of state. We have no doubt that that was hacked, and that state secrets are out there to the Iranians, the Russians, the Chinese and others. That alone should disqualify her from being president of the United States.” — Former NY Gov. George Pataki 10/29/15

VERSUS

“Investigators have not reached any conclusions about whether the information on the server was compromised or whether to recommend charges, according to the law enforcement officials.” — New York Times, 10/16/15

According to a format negotiated between the Republican National Committee and the television networks, future Presidential debates during the 2016 campaign will strictly forbid questions about things the candidates “said” or “did,” the R.N.C. confirmed on Monday.

In the new format, the time previously allotted to questions about things the candidates said or did will now be devoted to questions written by the candidates themselves and read, verbatim, by the moderators.

“Carly Fiorina would very much like to answer the question, ‘How has your experience as the most successful C.E.O. in U.S. history uniquely prepared you to be its greatest President?’ ” Priebus said. “This new format will let her speak to that.”

“On Monday, former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson endorsed Donald Trump. Tyson joins Trump’s biggest group of supporters: ‘People Who Have Been Hit in the Head a Lot.'” –Conan O’Brien

“But Tyson isn’t the only celebrity endorsing Trump. He’s also been endorsed by Kirstie Alley, Gary Busey, Dennis Rodman, and Hulk Hogan, which sounds like a season of ‘Celebrity Apprentice.'” –James Corden

“Republican candidate Mike Huckabee has earned endorsements from several members of the Duggar family. And that is a smart political move, since nearly 40 percent of Republican voters are actually members of the Duggar family.” –James Corden

“Bernie Sanders has received an endorsement from Justin Long, the actor who famously played a ‘Mac’ in those old Apple commercials. The endorsement meant so much to Bernie, he’s thinking of switching over to a Mac from his current computer, a yellow legal pad.” –James Corden

“Meanwhile, the other big competition from Boulder, Colorado, another Republican presidential debate on CNBC. Do we learn anything from these debates? The only thing voters might learn is CNBC is a channel.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“The two front-runners: Ben Carson, who doesn’t believe in evolution; and Donald Trump, who kind of proves his point.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Like a lot of New Yorkers, I am a little tired and pissed off this morning. I’m guessing a lot of you flipped over from the third Republican debate. I don’t know what happened yet because we taped this at 5:30, but I am super excited about the brand new Republican front-runner, retired neurosurgeon and current tired person Ben Carson.” –Stephen Colbert

“It’s been a great time for him. This surgeon is surging in the polls, 26 percent, ahead of Donald Trump’s 22 percent. The other 52 percent, of course, is going to the other 52 candidates.” –Stephen Colbert

“I haven’t been able to watch tonight’s Republican debate yet, but I’m excited to see the face-off between the party’s biggest opponents: Carson and staying awake.” –Stephen Colbert

“Chris Christie was kicked out of the Amtrak quiet car for making too much noise. Christie said it wasn’t him that was making the noise, it was his eight-pound block of peanut brittle.” –Conan O’Brien

“A cracker that survived the sinking of the Titanic sold today for $23,000. Experts say the 100-year-old Titanic cracker pairs very well with any hot dog from 7-Eleven.” –Conan O’Brien

“In response to his drop to second in the polls, Donald Trump said today that he will run until the very end and does not mind running from behind. Trump says he knows what it’s like to be the underdog, because he wears one on his head.” –Seth Meyers

“President Obama gave a speech in Chicago this afternoon and told police they have ‘work to do to restore trust’ in minority communities. It was going pretty well, but halfway through the speech, Obama got pulled over.” –Seth Meyers

“Former President George W. Bush yesterday spoke to voters on his brother’s behalf, and told them ‘one reason Jeb is going to win is because he’s a fierce competitor.’ Adding, ‘And one reason he’s going to lose is because of me.'” –Seth Meyers

Becky Quick, a CNBC correspondent, asked Rubio the following question:

Senator Rubio, you yourself have said that you’ve had issues. You have a lack of bookkeeping skills. You accidentally intermingled campaign money with your personal money. You faced foreclosure on a second home that you bought. And just last year you liquidated a sixty-eight-thousand-dollar retirement fund. That’s something that cost you thousands of dollars in taxes and penalties. In terms of all of that, it raises the question whether you have the maturity and wisdom to lead this seventeen-trillion-dollar economy. What do you say?

Rubio responded: “You just listed a litany of discredited attacks from Democrats and my political opponents and I’m not gonna waste sixty seconds detailing them all, ” as if that proved the accusations were false,.

Not a bad line. But Rubio must know that the issue of his finances isn’t going away. The Miami Herald has reported that Rubio “amended his financial disclosure forms … after The Miami Herald asked why they lacked a $135,000 home equity loan he obtained from a bank controlled by his political supporters.” The Tampa Bay Times has reported that Rubio “double-billed the Republican Party of Florida and state taxpayers for eight flights while he was House Speaker.” (He said that was a mistake, and that he would repay the party.) The Times also reported that “Rubio billed the party for more than $100,000 during the two years he served as the state’s House speaker,” and that “charges included repairs to the family minivan, grocery bills, plane tickets for his wife, and purchases from retailers ranging from a wine store near his home to Apple’s online store.” (Rubio said that the expenses were all related to party business.)

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been treated to a steady barrage of articles and opinion columns in virtually every major publication touting Marco Rubio as the most talented, the most likely, the most obvious survivor in this overcrowded field — the sole Establishment candidate who can survive the onslaught of the Trump-Carson crazies and walk away with the prize. The only flaw in the Rubio case is that there has been no evidence that his fellow Republicans particularly like him; as a first choice among GOP voters, his poll numbers are more or less in the 10 percent range (though, we’re assured, he’s everybody’s second choice).

Last night was Rubio’s opportunity to prove his case. He grabbed more speaking time than anyone except the tenaciously tedious Carly Fiorina. And he is nothing if not slick and glib. His response to every tough question is always the same. He invokes his father, a bartender, and his mother, a hotel maid. He sanctifies himself as the living proof of the power of the American dream. The litany sounds automatic at this point, but who knows? Maybe it plays. If his rise among actual voters, as opposed to pundits and political professionals, is to come, it must start now. Particularly since the once-favored candidate among Establishment Republicans, the fallen Jeb!, had the least speaking time last night, leaving Rubio an enormous opening to poach whatever remains of his onetime mentor’s support (and donors). John Kasich, who might also have inherited some of Jeb!’s mantle as the adult Republican in the room, and who seems far more substantive and accomplished than Rubio, came across as shrill and angry in tone in the debate (even when his words were not so). http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/10/the-gop-cracking-up.html

2. Jeffrey Toobin: Paul Ryan Won the Right to Do Nothing

The bizarre, extreme behavior of the Republicans now in charge of the House of Representatives reveals itself most strikingly in those it has chosen as its principal enemies—Boehner and his counterpart in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, now the Majority Leader. They are hardly what conservatives like to call “squishes.” As the leader of his party in the Senate, McConnell was best known for this expression of his priorities: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President.” Likewise, Boehner said the following about his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We’re going to do everything—and I mean everything we can do—to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”

In expressing these views, Boehner and McConnell were channelling the beliefs of their party. Republicans had no higher goals than to defeat Obama and stall his agenda. They failed to stop him from winning in 2012, but they did manage to vote dozens of time to repeal his signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act. In taking all these votes, the Republicans in the House never came up with an alternative to Obamacare, but that was never the point. The point was to oppose—endlessly.

The chilling reality, though, is that the new leadership in the House may make Obama and the country regard Boehner’s reign as the good old days. When he wasn’t hurling insults at the President, Boehner did have the temerity to meet with Obama and try to find common ground on a handful of areas, at least on keeping the government open. Mindful of the consequences of Boehner’s apostasies, Ryan’s team will probably not make that mistake.

The notion that Carson could be president is preposterous. The problem is not only that he has never run for elected office. He has never managed a large organization; he has not worked in and around public policy, and he lacks a competent grasp of issues. His stance on health care, the closest thing to an issue with which his professional experience has brought him into contact, is gibberish. He mostly thrills audiences by scoffing at evolution and insisting Muslims be barred from the presidency, stances he cannot even defend coherently.

It is possible that Carson has come to genuinely believe that he is qualified to serve as president. (As a follower of the conspiracy theorist W. Cleon Skousen, Carson seems to subscribe in earnest to a series of completely fantastical beliefs.) It is also possible that Carson is being manipulated by staffers who stand to profit off their association with him. But the most likely explanation for his behavior is that Carson himself is in this thing to make a lot of money.

Carson’s relationship with Mannatech, a medical-supplement operator that uses misleading claims to exploit Christian customers, may provide the most revealing window into his methodology. Consider the utterly calm and putatively genuine way in which Carson flatly denied a question at the last debate about his business relationship with Mannatech.

If you have the facts in mind — Carson maintained an extensive relationship with the company — when you watch his answer, his unflinching dishonesty has a chilling quality. He is a perfect con artist. And his history with Mannatech seems to serve as a precursor to his current enterprise. Carson used his inspiring story to pitch credulous (overwhelmingly Christian) customers. Carson has simply moved on to a bigger stage and cut out the middleman. The old scam was using the Ben Carson brand to pitch Mannatech. The new scam is pitching Ben Carson. 11/03/15 http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/11/ben-carson-running-for-president.html

4. Jonathan Alter: Paul Ryan, the Radical Now Running the House

Ryan has been explicit about repealing the New Deal. “It is so rare in American politics to arrive at a moment when the debate revolves around the fundamental nature of American democracy and the social contract, but that is exactly where we are today,” he said in 2012, the year he ran for vice president with Mitt Romney.

Since then, Ryan is showing signs of at least reassessing his rhetoric, if not his positions. In a 2014 memoir, The Way Forward, he expresses regret over his argument that 60 percent (more than Romney’s 47 percent) of Americans are “takers.” After listening to a Democratic speaker lay into him at a Wisconsin county fair, he thought to himself: “Who is a taker? My mom, who is on Medicare? Me at 18-years-old, using the Social Security survivor’s benefits we got after my father’s death to go to college? My buddy John Ramsdell, who had been unemployed and used job training to get back on his feet?.. That guy taught me a valuable lesson that day…The phrase I’d been using implied a certain judgment about the group that received government benefits—one that is in deep conflict with the American idea.”

This is an astonishing anecdote. Fifteen years after arriving in Congress it occurs to him that maybe he’s been a bit of a hypocrite in trashing programs his family has benefitted from. He realizes that maybe the libertarian doctrine he imbibed isn’t much of an answer to the problems of the modern world.

5. Republicans displayed their passion for the little guy at Wednesday’s debate. It was a total scam.

If you knew absolutely nothing about American politics and tuned into the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night, you would have come away convinced that the GOP is the party of the little guy, the party that wants to advocate for low-wage workers, middle-class families, and those who are struggling. And the wealthy? Screw those guys — Republicans can’t stand them. If somebody told you that this party’s last presidential nominee got in a heap of trouble for contemptuously saying that 47 percent of Americans are lazy leeches who just want to live off government handouts while the morally upstanding wealthy do all the work, you’d respond, “Surely you must be mistaken.”

All the tax plans that have been released by the Republican candidates so far shower their biggest benefits on the wealthy, not the middle class, both in percentage terms and in absolute terms.. They all either use a flat tax, which by definition cuts the taxes of the wealthy, or they reduce income taxes for the wealthy and eliminate other taxes the wealthy pay; for instance, Marco Rubio would completely eliminate both capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes. As Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times wrote, “among the proposals with real detail, there’s a rough consensus, and it comes down to this: lower taxes for everybody, but especially for the wealthy.” 10/29/15 http://theweek.com/articles/585830/republicans-displayed-passion-little-guy-wednesdays-debate-total-scam

6. Gail Collins: Oh, Those Debating Republicans

Hard to believe the race is still barely beginning — one week until one year until presidential Election Day! But you can’t say things have been boring. “What the hell are you people doing to me?” Trump demanded in Iowa, where he’s no longer in the lead. Perhaps we will look back on this as the moment when the former star of “The Apprentice” fired a state.

But about Wednesday night’s debate — the topic was economics, and the big takeaway was probably that when there are 10 people onstage, nobody is going to have to explain how that flat tax plan adds up. When in doubt, complain about government regulations.

Jeb Bush is not going to be the Republican presidential nominee. Neither is, let’s see — Christie, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina or any of the other supporting cast members. Ted Cruz did have a big moment when he answered a question about raising the debt limit by attacking the questioner. That went over so well that by the end of the two-hour session, the left-wing media had overtaken government regulators as the greatest threat to the future of American democracy.

Or do you think it could actually be Carson? The guy who seems to blame gun control for the Holocaust?

You’re all well familiar with Kubler-Ross’s famous five stages of death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Here are Tomasky’s five stages of watching a Republican debate: mockery, rage, double rage, boredom, despair.

I start, as I’d reckon most liberals do, with mockery, which was easy Wednesday night when most of them said in essence that their greatest flaw was that they cared too much (in fairness, Hillary Clinton had earlier said something similar). Then one of them says something unforgivably idiotic—and yes, there’s such a thing as forgivable idiocy—like Carly Fiorina pretending that the characters “401k” were handed down to the human race from God on Sinai and not created by the very federal government she was in that selfsame sentence traducing, and it’s rage time. And so on and so on.

But I end with despair, because the previous two (if we’re lucky) hours have revealed to me that these candidates and the citizens cheering them on just live in a totally different universe than the one I and most of my friends inhabit, and while there can be an occasional meeting of the minds on certain small matters, the sad fact is that we are going to be stuck with the current polarization for a long time yet. I think at least eight more years. 10.30.15 http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/30/there-s-no-centrist-superman-to-save-you.html

8. John Cassidy: Why the G.O.P. Candidates Don’t Do Substance

Take Cruz’s tax plan, which might be the most regressive and irresponsible one yet. According to the preliminary Tax Foundation analysis that Cruz cited, households in the top one per cent of the income distribution would see their post-tax income rise by 29.6 per cent, whereas households in the middle twenty per cent of the distribution would see their incomes rise by 1.5 per cent or less. (I’m citing the “static” estimates, which don’t incorporate an overly rosy growth scenario for tax revenues. But the “dynamic” figures also show a big difference in how the ultra-wealthy would make out relative to everybody else.)

Relative to the other candidates’ plans, Cruz’s proposal is at the edge of the curve, but in its basic features it’s not atypical. Given the way these plans work, about the only way to have them avoid looking like reverse-Robin Hood schemes is to exempt some of the households at the bottom of the income distribution from any federal income tax. That’s what Marco Rubio’s plan would do, for example, and another analysis from the Tax Foundation suggests that he was right when he claimed, in response to a challenge from CNBC’s John Harwood, that the biggest gains (in percentage terms) under his proposal would go to the poor. But the exemptions in his plan wouldn’t apply to payroll taxes paid by poor families, and they wouldn’t apply to any of the taxes paid by middle-income households. So Harwood, who had said that very rich households would make out a lot better than average households under Rubio’s plan, was also right.

That assessment is also true of Bush’s plan, and of Trump’s plan, and of Carson’s plan, and of Huckabee’s plan, and of Paul’s plan. Indeed, when you delve into the details of the Republicans’ economic proposals, it’s easy to see why most of them would rather not get into the details. G.O.P. primary voters tend to be tax averse. But most of them are also averse to tilting things even more in the direction of the donor class. 10/29/15 http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/why-the-g-o-p-candidates-dont-do-substance

9. Paul Krugman: Springtime for Grifters

At one point during Wednesday’s Republican debate, Ben Carson was asked about his involvement with Mannatech, a nutritional supplements company that makes outlandish claims about its products and has been forced to pay $7 million to settle a deceptive-practices lawsuit. The audience booed, and Mr. Carson denied being involved with the company. Both reactions tell you a lot about the driving forces behind modern American politics.

As it happens, Mr. Carson lied. He has indeed been deeply involved with Mannatech, and has done a lot to help promote its merchandise. PolitiFact quickly rated his claim false, without qualification. But the Republican base doesn’t want to hear about it, and the candidate apparently believes, probably correctly, that he can simply brazen it out. These days, in his party, being an obvious grifter isn’t a liability, and may even be an asset.

And this doesn’t just go for outsider candidates like Mr. Carson and Donald Trump. Insider politicians like Marco Rubio are simply engaged in a different, classier kind of scam — and they are empowered in part by the way the grifters have defined respectability down.

In an excellent June National Review article, Jim Geraghty ran through Rubio’s serious problems on immigration — running in 2010 as an amnesty opponent, co-authoring the 2013 bipartisan Senate immigration bill, then swiftly abandoning the bill and disavowing the entire approach, but doing so on procedural rather than substantive grounds.

Yet one surprising aspect of Geraghty’s story hasn’t held up well. Geraghty predicted that during debates “every one of [Rubio’s rivals] will surely remind GOP primary voters of Rubio’s role in creating and supporting the ‘Gang of Eight’ comprehensive immigration-reform bill” and that “it’s inconceivable that Rubio’s foes won’t hit him on this issue early and often.”

That certainly seems like what you would say if you wanted to beat Rubio. But so far none of the other candidates are doing it. Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the conservative Center for Immigration Reform, called Rubio’s brief remarks on immigration in the third debate “either clueless or lying … a useful caution for those excited by his genuine rhetorical gifts.” But nobody on stage called him on it. 11/02/15 http://www.vox.com/2015/11/2/9656288/marco-rubio-immigration-record

The conventional wisdom is that Carson is beloved for being a genial, soft-spoken figure and a non-politician with a distinguished biography. That may be true, though this does not necessarily distinguish him from many thousands of his fellow Americans. An equally obvious factor is that he is African American, and Republicans frustrated with being accused of white identity politics if not outright racism love being able to support a black candidate who is as conservative as they are.

Less obvious — and finally being recognized by political reporters spending time in Iowa — is that Carson is a familiar, beloved figure to conservative evangelicals, who have been reading his books for years.

Another factor, and one that I emphasized in my own take here two months ago <http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/the-secret-to-ben-carsons-success-calm-bedside-manner&gt;, is that Carson is a devoted believer in a number of surprisingly resonant right-wing conspiracy theories, which he articulates via dog whistles that excite fellow devotees (particularly fans of Glenn Beck, who shares much of Carson’s world-view) without alarming regular GOP voters or alerting the MSM.

So there remains what should actually disqualify Carson: his extremist, paranoid “world-view” which treats regular boring old center-left liberals as conscious and systematically deceitful would-be destroyers of this country bent on imposing a Marxist tyranny via “politically correct” suppression of free speech and confiscation of guns.

There’s unquestionably a constituency for this point of view, but we may never know whether it would outnumber the Republicans baffled or horrified by it until such time as one of his rivals or the heretofore clueless media start talking about it. If they don’t pretty soon, then one theory of the 2016 GOP nominating process could come true: conservatives want to rerun the 1964 elections, and they’ve finally found their Barry Goldwater. 11/04/14 http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/why-ben-carson-is-no-herman-cain

11. Matt Taibbi: The Case for Bernie Sanders

Sanders is a clear outlier in a generation that has forgotten what it means to be a public servant. The Times remarks upon his “grumpy demeanor.” But Bernie is grumpy because he’s thinking about vets who need surgeries, guest workers who’ve had their wages ripped off, kids without access to dentists or some other godforsaken problem that most of us normal people can care about for maybe a few minutes on a good day, but Bernie worries about more or less all the time.

I first met Bernie Sanders ten years ago, and I don’t believe there’s anything else he really thinks about. There’s no other endgame for him. He’s not looking for a book deal or a membership in a Martha’s Vineyard golf club or a cameo in a Guy Ritchie movie. This election isn’t a game to him; it’s not the awesomely repulsive dark joke it is to me and many others.

And the only reason this attention-averse, sometimes socially uncomfortable person is subjecting himself to this asinine process is because he genuinely believes the system is not beyond repair.

This site contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use,’ you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. “Go to Original” links are provided as a convenience to allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “Go to Original” links.

“It amazes me and it actually kind of scares me. I’ve been spending more time going after Bernie and socialism because I don’t want America to succumb to the notion that there’s anything good about socialism. I think it’s not an accident of history that most of the times when socialism has been tried that attendant with that has been mass genocide of people or any of those who object to it.” — Rand Paul warning the a Sanders presidency could lead to “mass genocide.”

“I would have taken her to task for that, and if she wins the nomination and if I win the nomination, trust me, this is not going to end.”— Jeb Bush, on Hillary’s email problem.

“OK, so here’s the deal. First of all, The Wall Street Journal was bought for $5 billion [in 2007]. It’s now worth $500 million, OK? They don’t have to tell me what to do.” — Donald Trump, after the WSJ called him “the most anti-trade candidate since Herbert Hoover.” 10/18/15

“Trey Gowdy is delusional if he thinks the Benghazi Committee’s partisan curtain hasn’t been lifted. The investigation into the tragic events in Benghazi stopped long ago, while the true focus of the Committee’s partisan, taxpayer-funded effort being to target Hillary Clinton. Through their actions, the Republicans have guaranteed that this Committee’s work will be remembered as a political witch hunt, spurred by leaked information, cheap partisan hackery and the long-debunked notion that this would ever be a fair investigation.” — David Brock 10/18/15

“We’re seeing our freedoms taken away every day and last night was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously. Last night was an audition for who would embrace government power for who would strip your and my individual liberties. Every one of the Democratic candidates is agreed on doubling down on the failed Obama strategies. So it was really quite interesting for America to see each and every Democratic candidate explain how they’re every bit as socialist as Bernie Sanders is.” — Ted Cruz, who acknowledged that he hadn’t actually watched the Democratic debate. 10/14/15 http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2015/10/ted-cruz-calls-democrats-debate-an-audition-to-wear-jackboots-of-despot.html/

“I would say in some ways these have been among the worst weeks of my life. Attacks on your character, attacks on your motives, are 1,000-times worse than anything you can do to anybody physically — at least it is for me.” — Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), on suggestions that his Benghazi investigation is only a political attack on Hillary Clinton.

“And in my judgement, with respect to Hillary Clinton, she will be a unique president if she is elected by the public next November, because the day she’s sworn in is the day that she’s subject to impeachment because she has committed high crimes and misdemeanors,” — Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) preparing to impeach Hillary Clinton, should she get elected.10/19/15

“I just don’t like the guy.” — George W. Bush about Ted Cruz. 10/19/15

“Absolutely. Good. I would do that.” — Donald Trump, about closing mosques as a measure to fight ISIS in the US. 10/21/15

Twenty-four people shot themselves or a family member/significant other. Eleven kids were accidentally shot, ranging in age from two to 17. There are three hunting accidents and three “home invasion” shootings, and a “thought she was an intruder” shooting.

The story of the week was the two women were accidentally shot and killed this week by boyfriends posing for Snapchat photos with their guns and training their laser sights on them.

Washington was in turmoil on Tuesday morning as a House select committee abruptly cancelled its Benghazi hearings shortly after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that she was withdrawing from the Presidential race.

“As you know, we have been preparing for this week’s hearings for months,” Gowdy said. “However, after meeting with fellow committee members over the past four minutes, we’ve come to the conclusion that we know all we need to know about Benghazi.”

But shortly after Gowdy’s announcement, Clinton called an impromptu press conference at 9:13 to announce that she was jumping back into the race. “I was just trying to prove a point,” she told reporters, before heading off to campaign stops in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Minutes after Clinton’s second announcement, an irate Gowdy called her decision to reenter the race “beyond unethical” and revealed that the committee’s investigators had just uncovered fresh evidence about Benghazi.

“‘When you talk about George Bush – I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time. …He was president, OK? Don’t blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was president. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.’ — Donald Trump 10/16/15

VERSUS

“How pathetic for @realdonaldtrump to criticize the president for 9/11. We were attacked & my brother kept us safe.” — Jeb Bush@JebBush who has always avoided the fact that the period of time during which Bush kept us safe includes 9/11 itself.

“It’s time for people to stand up and proclaim for what they believe and stop being bullied.” — Ben Carson, defending free speech on campus. 10/21/15

VERSUS

“I actually have something I would use the Department of Education to do. It would be to monitor our institutions of higher education for extreme political bias and deny federal funding if it exists.” — Ben Carson, opposing free speech on campus. 10/21/15

On October 7, 2015, you sent me a 13-page letter making a grave new accusation against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Specifically, you accused her of compromising national security and endangering lives.

The problem with your accusation—as with so many others during this investigation—is that you failed to check your facts before you made it, and the CIA has now informed the Select Committee that you were wrong. I believe your accusations were irresponsible, and I believe you owe the Secretary an immediate apology.

Contrary to your claims, the CIA yesterday informed both the Republican and Democratic staffs of the Select Committee that they do not consider the information you highlighted in your letter to be classified. Specifically, the CIA confirmed that “the State Department consulted with the CIA on this production, the CIA reviewed these documents, and the CIA made no redactions to protect classified information.”

Unfortunately, you sent your letter on October 7 without checking first with the CIA. Now that we have done so, we have learned that your accusations were incorrect.

Unfortunately, the standard operating procedure of this Select Committee has become to put out information publicly that is inaccurate and out of context in order to attack Secretary Clinton for political reasons. These repeated actions bring discredit on this investigation and undermine the integrity of the Select Committee and the House of Representatives.

“Moderator Anderson Cooper asked Lincoln Chafee why he switched parties from being a Republican, and Chafee called himself a ‘block of granite.’ When asked what he meant by that, Chafee said, ‘I meant that I’d make a better countertop than president.” –Jimmy Fallon

“Turned out it was the highest-rated debate for the Democrats ever. More than 15 million people tuned in to watch Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and the three high school principals they invited to fill out the stage.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Sanders supporters pointed to the fact that Bernie was the most googled of all the candidates during the debate. Sounds like a big thing until you realize the top questions they googled included, who is Bernie Sanders? And, is Bernie Sanders Jewish?” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Anderson cooper tried to make a case that Bernie Sanders isn’t electable because he calls himself a socialist. I think that’s the least of his problems. I think he isn’t electable because he calls himself Bernie.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Donald Trump was live tweeting the debate last night. This morning he told ABC News he thought Clinton got through it ‘fine.’ Which is the highest compliment he can give a woman without marrying her.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Sheryl Crow performed the National Anthem before last night’s debate, but many Twitter users were unhappy with her performance. Mostly because they thought the National Anthem was Uptown Funk.” –Seth Meyers

“During the debate, the candidates mentioned the middle class eleven times. Once for each remaining member of the middle class.” –Seth Meyers

“One of Bernie Sanders’ campaign advisers said they wanted him to tone down his yelling at tonight’s debate. You could tell he was yelling too much because I had to keep turning the volume UP to hear the commercials.” –Jimmy Fallon

“A new analysis of recent political speeches found that George W. Bush actually used longer and more complex words in his speeches than President Obama does. Granted none of those words were actually in the dictionary. ‘Don’t be condescencious. My vocablulation is completely misunderestimated.'” –Jimmy Fallon

October 28, 2015, in Boulder, Colorado. To be aired on CNBC
November 10, 2015 in Milwaukee. To be aired on the Fox Business network.
December 15, 2015, in Las Vegas. To be aire aired on CNN.
Next, sometime in January, in Iowa. To be aire aired on Fox News.
There will be 3debates in February, and at least two more expected afterward.

Democratic presidential debate schedule

November 6, 2015: First in the South Candidates Forum. To be aired on MSNBC. Details here.
November 14, 2015: Des Moines, Iowa. Hosted by CBS, KCCI, and the Des Moines Register.
December 19, 2015: Manchester, New Hampshire. Hosted by ABC and WMUR.
January 17, 2016: Charleston, South Carolina. Hosted by NBC and the Congressional Black Caucus Institute.
February 11, 2016: Somewhere in Wisconsin. Hosted by PBS.
March 9, 2016: Miami, Florida. Hosted by Univision and the Washington Post.

General election debate schedule

September 26, 2016: First presidential debate in Dayton, Ohio, at Wright State University
October 4, 2016: Vice presidential debate in Farmville, Virginia at Longwood University
October 9, 2016: Second presidential debate in St. Louis, Missouri, at Washington University in St. Louis
October 19, 2016: Third presidential debate in Las Vegas at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Wayne Simmons was arrested by the FBI for what the agency called “major fraud” — lying about having worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for nearly 30 years, and then using that lie to obtain government security clearances.

Before his arrest Simmons was a frequent contributor on Fox News, which billed him as a “former CIA operative.” As might be expected, he used his claimed experience to make provocative assertions – such as telling Fox News that the Speaker of the House (Nancy Pelosi) is a pathological liar. 10/16/15 http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/10/16/3713099/fox-news-wayne-simmons/

14. CIA shrugs off Clinton’s ‘classified’ email

The credibility of the Republican-led Benghazi committee came under fresh attack Sunday after the CIA informed the panel that it does not view a 2011 email forwarded by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as including any classified information. The committee chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., had cited Clinton’s handling of the March 18, 2011, email as a prime example of her misusing her private email server to receive and send highly classified information. 10/19, 2015 https://www.yahoo.com/politics/cia-shrugs-off-clinton-s-1281399243022390.html

Fifty-five percent of Americans say they want laws covering the sale of firearms to be stricter than they are now, a distinct rise of eight percentage points from 2014. Fewer Americans than last year want the laws to be less strict, and the proportion who want the laws to stay the same has also declined slightly. 10/19/15 http://www.gallup.com/poll/186236/americans-desire-stricter-gun-laws-sharply.aspx

18. Ted Cruz comments on the Democrat’s debate – that he hadn’t watched

Ted Cruz, who acknowledged that he hadn’t actually watched the Democratic debate, said:

“It was more socialism, more pacifism, more weakness & less Constitution. It was a recipe to destroy a country.”

“We’re seeing our freedoms taken away every day and last night was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously. Last night was an audition for who would embrace government power for who would strip your and my individual liberties.”

1. Heather Digby Parton: The resurrection of the “liberal”: How the right tried to destroy American liberalism — and how it came back from the dead

What a difference a decade makes. On Tuesday night, the Democratic presidential candidates not only openly identified themselves as progressives, they embraced gun control, support for Planned Parenthood, criminal justice reform, LGBT and immigrant rights, and a long, impressive list of progressive economic reforms. The moderators even asked if the candidates considered themselves to be capitalists, a question so startling it would have drawn gasps from the audience in the not too distant past. Instead of rushing to defend their all-American capitalist bona fides as they once would have done, Bernie Sanders matter of factly said he didn’t consider himself a “casino capitalist,” and Hillary Clinton said she hope to save capitalism from itself. These comments from front-running Democratic candidates would have once been the headlines in the morning papers. Instead, it pretty much passed unnoticed. Indeed, it appears that even the word “socialism” is once again respectable, a development which would have caused the political establishment to collectively call for the fainting couch just a few years ago. 10/15/15 Read more at http://www.salon.com/2015/10/15/the_resurrection_of_the_liberal_how
_conservatives_tried_to_destroy_american_liberalism_and_how_it_came_back_from_the_dead/

2. Jamelle Bouie: An Empty Conspiracy

At this point, the House Select Committee on Benghazi is a dead letter. Democrats will dismiss it entirely, Hillary Clinton—in her upcoming testimony—will likely treat it with contempt, and the media will disregard its claims. Indeed, there’s a chance this could spread beyond the committee to Clinton’s email controversy.

For all the noise over her server, there’s been no evidence of wrongdoing or legal misconduct in Clinton’s emails. And President Obama has challenged the idea that Clinton harmed national security by using a private system. Barring genuine revelations, the collapse of the Benghazi committee might create skepticism around future email releases. In other words, it could kill the story or at least make it less critical to Clinton coverage.

There are a lot of ways to contrast the Democratic debate Tuesday night with the Republican debates, but one thing would likely get agreement across the spectrum – from voters in red states and blue states, liberals and conservatives: Democrats avoided personal attacks and insults and debated the issues; Republicans have spent much more time during their debates attacking one another, with the vitriol and bile of Donald Trump leading the race to the bottom.

Tuesday night in Las Vegas, Senator Sanders exemplified what all the Democrats in the debate conveyed: He refused to attack Hillary Clinton personally and refused to make an issue of the email controversy. He received a standing ovation from the crowd, and he deserved it.

Sen. Sanders said that most Americans care more about hearing discussions about solutions to their most important problems. Of course he is right, according to all the polls.

So good for Sen. Sanders – the handshake with Hillary Clinton was the high point of the evening.

Why? Because most Americans want civil disagreement – a debate about the issues – not personal attacks.

If this were one of Trey Gowdy’s murder prosecutions, it would be declared a mistrial.

For 17 months, the former prosecutor who leads the House Benghazi committee has labored to give the appearance of diligence and impartiality. But, in an inexplicable and ruinous outbreak of honesty in recent weeks, the thing is unraveling just in time for Gowdy’s moment in the spotlight: Hillary Clinton’s testimony Thursday.

The ham-handed targeting of Clinton predates the Gowdy panel. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who led an earlier Benghazi investigation, suggested, falsely, that Clinton had issued a “stand-down” order to block a military response the night of the Benghazi attack. Issa also alleged, falsely, that Clinton personally authorized security reductions in Libya with her “signature” on a cable.

The contretemps have continued under Gowdy. The chairman claimed that he had “zero interest” in the Clinton Foundation and hadn’t issued a subpoena related to it or interviewed a “single person” about it other than the staffer who set up Clinton’s private email server. But Gowdy had armed marshals serve a subpoena at the home of Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal, and Gowdy and others asked Blumenthal numerous questions about the foundation.

Could such a skilled prosecutor and his experienced staff really be so hapless? Or are the mistakes more purposeful? Consider the damaging New York Times story this summer that initially reported, incorrectly, that federal inspectors general had requested a “criminal investigation” into whether Clinton “mishandled sensitive government information.”

5. Edward Maibach: Voters to GOP: ‘I’m not a scientist’ won’t cut it on climate change

If the Republican Party wants to win the White House in 2016, it should take climate change seriously.

Republicans have been groping for the right way to talk about global warming. They want to satisfy their big donors — fossil fuel companies and executives, for example, which don’t want regulations imposed on carbon pollution — without frustrating or alienating voters. Until recently, this quandary yielded tortured statements from politicians like “I’m not a scientist.”

A wiser approach for GOP candidates would be to walk out of the corner they have painted themselves into and embrace the handful of congressional GOP climate realists who recently issued a resolution recognizing human-caused climate change and calling for debate on how best to limit it.

The data are clear: Most Americans, including most Republicans and most Latinos, want to limit carbon pollution. There is only one winning position for the GOP candidates: embrace climate change, and make a forceful case for the policies that they feel will be most effective in addressing the problem. Anything else is likely to make it harder for Republicans to take back the White House in 2016. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-maibach-gop-climate-change-position-20151016-story.html

6. Eugene Robinson: Democrats debate issues people care most about

The main event was Clinton versus Sanders, and what should worry Republicans is that the two leading Democrats spent so much of the evening on the issues Americans say they care about. To cite one representative survey, a recent CBS poll asked registered voters what they most wanted to hear the candidates discuss. “Economy and jobs” came in first at 24 percent, while “immigration” was a distant second at 11 percent and “foreign policy” third at 10 percent.

But what do Republicans talk about in their debates? Who is going to be toughest on illegal immigration, who is more opposed to President Obama’s foreign policy, who is more determined to defund Planned Parenthood. On the economy, they fight to establish who is more opposed to raising the minimum wage.

The GOP establishment candidates have no economic message to offer beyond the party’s standard prescription of tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation for businesses. That may be why the front-runners are Trump and Carson, who have never held public office and whose economic prescriptions are more populist.

Republicans have screwed the pooch on Benghazi. The press can only play along with their faux investigation as long as they maintain plausible deniability about its partisan goals. But now we have (a) Kevin McCarthy spilling the beans, (b) news reports that John Boehner wanted to use the committee to attack Hillary, (c) Richard Hanna agreeing that it was mostly a partisan witch hunt, and (d) no less than the New York Times reporting that the committee has all but given up on Benghazi in favor of holding hearings on Hillary’s email server. We knew all along there was a man behind the curtain, but now he’s actually been exposed. It’s getting harder and harder to play along with the charade. 10/15/15 http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/10/benghazi-charade-finally-melting-away

8. Amy Davidson: Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, the 9/11 Bullies

In the past few days, one thing we’ve been reminded of, as Donald Trump and Jeb Bush have sniped at each other about whether George W. Bush “kept us safe,” is that the two men represent two different schoolyard types. Trump is the sort of bully who relies on a freewheeling instinct for the weaknesses of others—in this case, an opponent who is reduced to befuddled outrage whenever he is called on to speak publicly about his brother. Trump’s aim can be scattershot, but he can hurt. Jeb Bush is a more refined bully, who simply expects everyone to share his amazement that a person who doesn’t fit in would dare show up for a party or for a debate—the sort whose go-to insult is “weirdo.” “Does anybody actually blame my brother for the attacks on 9/11? If they do, they’re totally marginalized in our society,” Bush told Jake Tapper, on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

And that is where Jeb Bush most gets lost. He is setting Trump—and not just Trump—up for the obvious reply: maybe no terrorist group followed up with anything like the September 11th attacks, but George W. Bush launched an invasion of Iraq that crumbled into civil war, destabilized the region, led to the neglect of Afghanistan, and laid the foundation for ISIS. By keeping “us” safe, does Jeb Bush also mean the more than four thousand Americans who died in Iraq, the more than three thousand who died in Afghanistan, and the many thousands more who were wounded? It’s a good guess that “us” does not encompass the Iraqis who died; their estimated number ranges from a hundred thousand to more than half a million. Perhaps by “safe,” Bush only means “complacent.” 10/19/15 http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/donald-trump-and-jeb-bush-the-911-bullies

9. Brian Beutler: The Benghazi Witch-Hunt Against Hillary Is Backfiring Just Like Bill Clinton’s Impeachment

Back in 1998, House Republican leaders had to dial back an investigation into the Clintons’ campaign finance practices after then-oversight committee chairman Dan Burton tried to hoodwink the press with heavily edited transcripts meant to implicate Hillary. That botched operation forced Burton to fire his top aide David Bossie, who went on to become president of Citizens United, and prompted an angry backlash from Speaker Newt Gingrich on behalf of an embarrassed Republican conference.

The recent blows to the Benghazi committee’s self-styled credibility are at least as severe, beginning with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s admission that Republicans empaneled it to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy, running through well-substantiated allegations that Republicans have been using committee resources to investigate Clinton at the expense of the actual attacks on the U.S. facility in Libya.

In the nearly two decades since the last Clinton investigations went nowhere, social media has made it easier for events like congressional hearings to become defined by key moments, rather than by overall substance, and if Republicans are able to embarrass Hillary on Thursday once or twice, the dividends will dwarf any reputational damage the committee has suffered. Ever since Watergate, Republicans have been consumed with the certainty that a similar scandal will one day befall Democrats, and have gone to great lengths to make it so. But when their inquiries run aground, or devolve into partisan witch hunting, they eventually relent, and allow the investigations to fizzle out. The Benghazi committee is flirting with the same fate. 10/19/15 http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123155/benghazi-witch-hunt-against-hillary-backfiring-bills-impeachment

DIRECT is a FREE web based weekly eZine. On most Thursday mornings subscribers are sent an email notice with the table of contents and link to the current issue.

ToSUBSCRIBE: Email jellison@san.rr.com with “subscribe” on the subject line. NOTE: Your email address will not be shared – ever!

This site contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use,’ you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. “Go to Original” links are provided as a convenience to allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “Go to Original” links.

“I want to continue to be a Republican because it annoys them.” — Colin Powell 9/30/15

“African Americans fought for the right to vote in the face of unthinkable hatred. They stood up and were beaten down, marched and were turned back. Some were even killed. But in the end, the forces of justice overcame. Alabama should do the right thing. It should reverse this decision. And it should start protecting the franchise for every single voter, no matter the color of their skin.” — Hillary Clinton on the closure of 31 driver’s license offices in Alabama’s mostly in majority-black counties. 10/02/15

“The only people in the lead in primary are the people who’ve never been in government, because they’ve spent 35 years telling people to hate government. I felt bad for them. In the first debate, it felt like they were taking a theology test in hatred of government, and Trump blew past them.” — Bill Clinton, 10/02/15

“According to multiple sources, it was Biden himself who talked to her [renowned Hillary Clinton-critic Maureen Dowd], painting a tragic portrait of a dying son, Beau’s face partially paralyzed, sitting his father down and trying to make him promise to run for president because “the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.” — Edward-Isaac Dovere in Politico10/06/15

On the Republican Party’s Benghazi investigation:

“To put it simply, the game is over, and they’ve lost. This was supposed to be the big moment for Gowdy and his committee and instead what we have is the person who’s likely the next speaker validating everything critics have been saying. . . . Now everyone can see the fact that this has been a partisan charade all along.” — David Brock about Rep. McCarthy’s Benghazi Committee comment 10/01/15

“What he (Rep. McCarthy) said was, it’s very much to the effort to reduce Hillary Clinton’s numbers, her favorability numbers, her trustworthy numbers in the mind of the American people before the election. I don’t think there’s any question that’s what this has been about. She’s testified seven times and they haven’t found anything and they’ve got her coming again in late October to testify.”– Juan Williams

“I will tell you, I am going to fight for new, effective gun control measures. I gotta tell you it is just heartbreaking, it is sickening to me to see another massacre.” — Hillary Clinton. 10/02/15

The Obama administration … tries to use these tragedies as an excuse to come after the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens. It’s unconstitutional, it’s cynical, and it’s wrong.” — Sen.Ted Cruz 10/02/15
“Meanwhile, the shallow and simple minded liberals will continue to blame pieces of hardware for the problem, and they will long for the days before firearms were invented.” — Bobby Jindal 10/06/15

“Not only would I probably not cooperate with him, I would not just stand there and let him shoot me, I would say, ‘Hey guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.'” — Ben Carson, on what he would have done had a gunman walked up to him and asked him to state his religion. 10/06/15

““But no matter what you do you will have problems and that’s the way the world goes.” — Donald Trump 10/04/15

“If you have crazy people who want to kill a lot of individuals, they’ll find a way to do it.” — Mike Huckabee 10/02/15

“How on Earth could he compile 13 guns? How can that happen? They talk about gun laws, they talk about gun control. Every time something like this happens, they talk about it, and nothing is done. I’m not trying to say that that’s what to blame for what happened, but if Chris had not been able to get a hold of 13 guns, it wouldn’t have happened.” — Ian Mercer, the father of Chris Harper Mercer 10/04/15

“Our enemies are armed. We must do likewise.” — Tennessee Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey (R) on Facebook, saying that “fellow Christians who are serious about their faith” should “think about getting a handgun permit.” 10/02/15

1. Democrats Release New Video and Fact Sheet: “Couldn’t Be More Plain”

Democrats on the Select Committee on Benghazi released a new video and fact sheet rebutting claims made by Chairman Trey Gowdy that the Committee is not focused on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The new video and fact sheet come after Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted on national television that the purpose of the Select Committee has always been to damage Hillary Clinton’s bid for President.

3. The Borowitz Report: Americans Opposed to Being Shot Seek Representation in Washington

Carol Foyler, founder of the lobbying group Americans Opposed to Being Shot, believes that the right to not be shot, much like women’s right to vote, the right to same-sex marriage, and other rights that were deemed controversial in their day, may be an idea whose time has finally come.

“For years, we’ve been talking about the right to not be shot and people have been looking at us like we’re out of our minds,” she said. “But recent polls show that a vast majority of Americans, in fact, do not want to be shot.”

While Foyler and other anti-being-shot activists believe that Washington may finally be receptive to their radical ideas, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, is doubtful. “People who don’t want to be shot are a very narrow interest group,” he said. Read more at http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/

4. The DAILY GRILL

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable [sic]. But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen.”- House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’ (R-CA) (Check out Correct The Record’s newest video on Kevin McCarthy at http://correctrecord.org/video-reactions-to-kevin-mccarthys-gaffe/)

“The story says that Donald Trump gets so little sleep, he actually suffers from sleep deprivation. Then again, so do most people who think about Donald Trump becoming president.” –Jimmy Fallon

“NSA leaker Edward Snowden joined Twitter yesterday, and immediately got more followers than the NSA. Which raises an interesting question: Who’s following the NSA on Twitter?” –Jimmy Fallon

“While visiting America, Pope Francis secretly met with Kim Davis, the county clerk who denied marriage licenses to gay couples. At first she refused to meet with the Pope because she was told, ‘There’s a guy in a dress named Francis here to see you.'” –Conan O’Brien

“Donald Trump’s wife, an immigrant from Slovenia, says she lets Trump be himself. She said, in return, he lets me be in America.” –Conan O’Brien

“Governor Bobby Jindal’s presidential campaign is angrily insisting that the “Duck Dynasty” cast supports him and not Donald Trump. And that is the current report on the state of the Bobby Jindal campaign.” –Conan O’Brien

“After their meeting got off to a tense start, Obama and Putin wound up talking for 90 minutes, and Putin described the talks as ‘surprisingly open.’ Putin said it was the most productive conversation he’d ever had with someone who wasn’t tied to a chair.” –Jimmy Fallon

“While in New York City, President Obama and Vladimir Putin met and the meeting was described as awkward. Apparently Obama was upset that he looks nothing like his Tinder photo.” –Conan O’Brien

“In a speech Marco Rubio talked about the danger of electing a president who does not understand technology. Unfortunately, Rubio’s speech was interrupted when his beeper went off. He had to get to a pay phone.” –Conan O’Brien

“Donald Trump came out with this proposal for a new tax plan yesterday. Just like a real presidential candidate would do! It’s kind of adorable.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Trump plans to raise taxes on the very rich — which doesn’t include him because he’s very, VERY rich.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Under Trump you won’t have to pay any income taxes if you make less than $25,000 a year, if you and your spouse make under $50,000 a year, and if you capture an illegal Mexican you won’t pay any taxes at all.” –Jimmy Kimmel

7. Majority of House Republicans vote to shut down government over women’s health, and lose

Five out of eight Republican House members voted to shut down government over women’s health care on Wednesday. Just 91 of them voted with Democrats and, in the words of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, “[o]ne-hundred and fifty one Republicans decided their obsession with women’s health was more important than the thousands of disabled veterans, disadvantaged children and working families who would pay the price of another government shutdown.” That vote, and how candidates for leadership voted, doesn’t bode well for the future of the Republican conference and a functioning Congress. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/01/1426680/-Majority-of-House-Republicans-vote-to-shut-down-government-over-women-s-health-and-lose

American deaths in terrorism vs. gun violence: From 2004 to 2013, 316,545 people died by firearms on U.S. soil. (2013 is the most recent year CDC data for deaths by firearms is available.) This data covered all manners of death, including homicide, accident and suicide.

There has been seemingly endless discussion over the last few months about potential big name Democratic primary challengers entering the race to take out Hillary Clinton. So Public Policy Polling newest national poll tested Clinton not just against Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, but also against Al Gore and Elizabeth Warren and John Kerry and to make sure we were covering all our bases even Michael Dukakis.

Clinton leads the Democratic race with 42% to 24% for Sanders, 20% for Biden, 2% for Jim Webb, and 1% each for Lincoln Chafee and Martin O’Malley. Among Biden voters, 44% say Clinton would be their second choice to only 21% who say Sanders would be. If Biden doesn’t get in and you reallocate his backers to their second choice, Clinton leads Sanders 51 to 28. 10/06/15 Read more at http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/main/2015/10/clinton-leads-every-democrat-under-the-sun.html

Because the same Alabama Legislature that could not raise enough money to properly run the state in three sessions this year decided in 2011 that all voters must have a photo ID. It was such a great idea that Gov. Robert Bentley signed that bill into law despite complaints that such a move would disproportionately disenfranchise black voters.

It went into effect last year. And now this.

So Alabama closes 31 driver license offices. And while the cuts come across Alabama, they are deepest in the Black Belt. The harm is inflicted disproportionately on voters who happen to be black, and poor, in sparsely populated areas.

Perhaps Kevin McCarthy is clumsy enough to be a Speaker Democrats can really get behind.

After McCarthy’s candid admission that the House Benghazi committee only exists to beat up Hillary Clinton, House Oversight Committee chair Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) is rebuking McCarthy for saying something so totally outrageous as what everybody knows to be obviously true. But let’s go a little further in stating the painfully obvious. The “Benghazi” story, issue, whatever you want to call it, has always been about and solely about exploiting the death of four Americans for partisan political gain.

Always.

From day one.

The exploitation and conspiracy derp predated having any idea what happened because that was what it was about: working a political angle. What actually happened, good or bad, was a secondary detail – facts of whatever sort which could be used or arranged in such a way to advance the core goal: exploiting the deaths for political gain.

Republican Rep. Peter King probably put it best when he said of Boehner’s resignation: “I think it signals that crazies have taken over the party.”

Ya think? Heck, some of us — including some Republicans — have been saying that for years. Moreover, the unruliness of the tea party seems part and parcel of a more general lawlessness that has afflicted the once-upon-a-time party of law and order. Consider how GOP presidential candidates rushed to lionize Kentucky bureaucrat Kim Davis, who, in declining to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, did only what George Wallace and Orval Faubus did once upon a time: refused to abide by a Supreme Court ruling. Unable to vindicate their ideals within the rules, conservatives seem increasingly unwilling to be constrained by rules or, indeed, by much of anything.

These are the forces that felled Boehner, and you might describe it as a case of just deserts given that the speaker once supported, and saw political benefit from, the unleashing of those selfsame forces. But what happened here is not good for any of us. Governance in a democracy requires give and take between at least two political parties. More and more, we seem to find ourselves one party short, the GOP choosing instead to function as a cult or belief system.

Gun violence is a singular issue in this country, grotesquely defended by the cult of the gun and enshrouded in a romanticized interpretation of the 2nd Amendment that the Supreme Court wrongfully endorsed in its 2008 District of Columbia versus Heller decision recognizing an individual right to bear arms. It’s sobering to note the Washington Post’s analysis that not a calendar week has gone by in President Obama’s second term that has not included at least one mass shooting (identified as four or more victims killed or injured).

ShootingTracker.com counts 375 people (including gunmen) killed and 1,089 wounded this year as of Thursday in 294 incidents in which four or more people were shot though not necessarily killed. And the carnage continues: Associated Press reports that on Thursday night in Florida, three more people were killed, including the gunman, and a fourth wounded.

Yet elected officials in state legislatures and Congress largely do nothing, clinging to a near-religious embrace of the right to bear arms in a political theater owned by gun manufacturers and their gun-worshipping acolytes. Not only is that a dereliction of the elected officials’ duty to keep the American people safe, it is a horrific disregard for human life. And the shame is shared by an electorate that doesn’t demand more. 10/02/15 Read more at http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-oregon-guns-20151003-story.html

4. Kathleen Parker: The New McCarthyism is dead on arrival

The consequences of McCarthy’s sleight of tongue can’t be overstated. It wasn’t just a Washington gaffe — when someone accidentally tells the truth. It was a self-inflicted, potentially fatal wound, not just to McCarthy but to Republicans more broadly, including those running for president.

One minute McCarthy was the near-certain next speaker of the House; the next he was persona non grata as GOP colleagues, their own minds hurtling through various apocalyptic scenarios, hammered him.

McCarthy has since tried to cram the bad genie back into the bottle, but the damage has been done and can’t be undone.

Essentially, he had handed Clinton the keys to her prison cell. Held hostage these past three years by a series of Republican interrogators about the September 2012 attack in Libya that killed our ambassador and three others, she has been liberated.

The Benghazi hearings that led to the private server, that led to the missing 30,000 e-mails, that led to the FBI investigation that thus far has led only to the conclusion that she was hackable — have been reduced in the public mind to a political hit job organized to damage her chances of becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.

This isn’t necessarily the whole of it — House Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) and others certainly believe there’s more to know — but the cement has set on what McCarthy implied. At the very least, any previous suspicions that Republicans were just out to get Clinton have cleared the bar of reasonable doubt.

There was not a single reporter in America who heard McCarthy’s comments and said, “Wait a minute — the Benghazi committee is political? My god!” So why would McCarthy’s remark get so much press attention when it’s merely stating the obvious? The answer lies in reporters’ frustration.

Nobody likes to be lied to, even if the lie is exactly what they expect, and even if the lie can be dismissed as mere spin. Politicians are constantly spinning to reporters, so in response, the reporters look for any opportunity to uncover, refute, or discredit those lies, whether they were trivial or momentous. That’s one reason that so much political coverage is about strategy, coverage that essentially says, “This is what politicians are saying, but the more important truth can be found in their motives.” It characterizes all politics as theater, a great big fiction meant to mislead and manipulate. By talking about politics that way, reporters not only assert their own agency but assure themselves and their audience that they haven’t been taken in, that they’re no suckers.

But every once in a while, a politician gets caught in a lie but refuses to act properly contrite. So it is with Carly Fiorina, who for the last couple of weeks has kept repeating falsehoods about what was on those Planned Parenthood “sting” videos, no matter how many times she gets corrected. Fiorina’s calculation, which may well be accurate, is that it’s working, so why stop? Her poll numbers are rising and anti-abortion Republicans are treating her like their new hero, so who cares what a bunch of fact-checkers say? Read more at http://theweek.com/articles/580404/why-kevin-mccarthys-gaffe-enraged-reporters

6. E.J. Dionne Jr.: The conservative evasion on guns

Conservatives might usefully listen to former Australian prime minister John Howard, who has noted that he led “a center-right coalition” whose parties represented “virtually every nonurban electoral district in the country.” In other words, his party is a lot like our Republicans.

After a psychologically disturbed man killed 35 people in Tasmania, Howard championed state bans on the ownership, possession and sale of all automatic and semiautomatic weapons by Australia’s states, along with a federal ban on their importation. He also sponsored a gun buyback scheme that got almost 700,000 guns — the statistical equivalent of 40 million in the United States — off the streets and destroyed. “Few Australians would deny that their country is safer today as a consequence of gun control,” Howard wrote in the New York Times shortly after the Newtown killings.

Politicizing this struggle means being unrelentingly candid in calling out an American conservative movement that proudly champions law and order but allows itself to be dominated by gun extremists who deride every gun measure that might make our country a little bit safer — no matter how many mass killings we have.

The huge election victory in 2014, which included recapturing the Senate, emboldened the radicals—the government shutdown they had pushed in 2013 did not cost them at the polls. But it left party leaders in both houses realizing that now, with Republicans controlling all of Congress, the need to show responsibility, no longer playing games with shutdowns or debt limits, was even greater. The growing strength of populist radicals resulted in the ironic primary defeat of the head Young Gun, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, by Tea Partyite Dave Brat.

It was inevitable that these two forces—radicals flexing their muscles, demanding war against Obama from their congressional foxholes, and leaders realizing that a hard line was a fool’s errand—would collide violently. The party outside Congress, including at the grass roots, has itself become more radical, and angrier at the party establishment for breaking promises and betraying its ideals. When polls consistently show that two-thirds of Republicans favor outsiders for their presidential nomination, it is not surprising that Ted Cruz would call his own Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, a liar on the Senate floor. Even insiders like Marco Rubio and Chris Christie have been eager to treat McConnell and Boehner like pinatas.

By any reasonable standard, John Boehner is a bedrock conservative—opposed to big government, pro-life, and in favor of big tax cuts. Boehner would have been placed at the right end of his party a couple of decades ago. But as a realist operating in the real world of divided government and separation of powers, he became a target within his own ranks. Now he is almost at the left end of a party that has gone from center-right to right-center to a place that is more radical than it is conservative—what Tom Mann and I called “an insurgent outlier.” On the verge of losing complete control, Boehner bailed. Boehner, with a month to go, may try to avert a shutdown and make the job of his likely successor, Young Gun Kevin McCarthy, easier. That won’t last long. In the new tribal world of radical politics, the first constitutional office has lost its luster. 9/25/15 Read more at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/how-gop-radicals-made-the-speakership-unappealing/407563/

8. Paul Krugman: Voodoo Never Dies

So Donald Trump has unveiled his tax plan. It would, it turns out, lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit.

This is in contrast to Jeb Bush’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit, and Marco Rubio’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit.

For what it’s worth, it looks as if Trump’s plan would make an even bigger hole in the budget than Jeb’s. Jeb justifies his plan by claiming that it would double America’s rate of growth; The Donald, ahem, trumps this by claiming that he would triple the rate of growth. But really, why sweat the details? It’s all voodoo. The interesting question is why every Republican candidate feels compelled to go down this path.

You might think that there was a defensible economic case for the obsession with cutting taxes on the rich. That is, you might think that if you’d spent the past 20 years in a cave (or a conservative think tank). Otherwise, you’d be aware that tax-cut enthusiasts have a remarkable track record: They’ve been wrong about everything, year after year.

9. Paul Waldman: Ben Carson is ready for the coming American apocalypse

As someone who has never run for office before and who seems to neither know nor care much about the substance of what a president does, Ben Carson’s appeal among Republican voters can be a little hard to discern. He’s outwardly devout, appealing to evangelical voters — but so are many of the other presidential hopefuls (Mike Huckabee is even an actual Baptist minister). He has an inspiring life story, which is great, but that doesn’t necessarily make you choose him over other candidates. He’s an “outsider,” but so are lots of other contenders (even some who currently serve in Congress claim that mantle).

But there’s one thing that distinguishes him from other candidates that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, and may have something to do with the fact that Carson is firmly in second place in the GOP race: only he fully embraces an apocalyptic vision of the American nightmare that is upon us. More than anyone else, he represents a particular fringe faction of the conservative movement, one that saw its prominence increase during the early years of the Obama administration, but as of late has been fading somewhat.

If you listen to Carson, you won’t have to wait long before he references some bizarre conspiracy theory or says something indicating that he thinks everything is about to turn to hell. This a marked contrast with Donald Trump, for instance, who insists that America is already a dump, where our leaders are idiots, China stole all our jobs, and we never win anything. Carson, on the other hand, says that the real cataclysm isn’t here yet, but it’s on its way. Read more at http://theweek.com/articles/580740/ben-carson-ready-coming-american-apocalypse

Within the span of just 12 hours this week, multiple Republican-sponsored political pursuits partially unraveled in plain sight.

The long-running investigations were the Benghazi select committee and the related probe into Hillary Clinton’s private emails, and Republicans’ crusade targeting Planned Parenthood. Journalists would be wise to take note of the pattern of plain deception and ask themselves if they want to keep sponsoring these planned distractions.

One reason these Groundhog Day scenes keeping play out, again and again and again, is the fact that too many journalists are absolutely wed to the very simple definition of what constitutes news: What are conservatives angry about?

As Media Matters can attest, virtually none of the often-hysterical allegations attached to those distractions were ever proven to be true. Instead, the pursuits imploded under their own weight. Yet too often, these supposed scandals broke out of the Fox News bubble and became mainstream “news.”

This site contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use,’ you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. “Go to Original” links are provided as a convenience to allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “Go to Original” links.

“Extreme views about women? We expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world. But it’s a little hard to take coming from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States.” — Hillary Clinton comparing the Republican presidential field to “terrorist groups” where women’s issues are concerned.

The more you look at the Biden bandwagon, it looks more like a ghost ship being pulled through the mist by a combination of hungry political reporters, Hillary haters (including most of the conservative media), and Delaware-based Friends of Joe who, of course, would love to see him run.” — Ed Kilgore 8/26/15

“Look, nobody knows the tax code better than I do. OK. I know it better. I’m the king of the tax code.” — Donald Trump, 8/28/15

“If we were to elect someone who’s been part of the problem creating the socialism, really there is no hope.” — Sarah Palin 8/27/15

“In addition to saying “hateful things” about immigrants, he “also insults and dismisses women. Just yesterday he attacked me once again and said I didn’t have a clue about women’s health issues. Really? I mean you can’t make this stuff up, folks. Trump actually says he would do a much better job for women than I would. Now that’s a general election debate that’s going to be a lot of fun.” — Hillary Clinton 8/28/15

It is “the height of irony that a party which espouses small government would want to unleash a massive law enforcement effort – including perhaps National Guard and others – to go and literally pull people out of their homes and their workplaces, round them up, put them, I don’t know, in buses, boxcars, in order to take them across our border. I just find that not only absurd, but appalling,” — Hillary Clinton 8/28/15

“Yes, I believe we can pray potholes away. Moses prayed and a sea opened up.” — Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Tony Yarber, on his cities’ need for $743 million worth of repairs to its crumbling infrastructure.

“The party of Lincoln has become the party of Trump.”— Hillary Clinton. 8/29/15

“Look, Jeb Bush was a very successful governor, he’s a thoughtful man, he was a good, conservative governor. But every day, Donald Trump is emasculating Jeb Bush, and Republican primary voters are not going to default to the establishment candidate who is being weakened by these attacks that go unresponded to.” — GOP strategist Steve Schmidt. 8/31/15

1. The Borowitz Report: Cutting Losses, Kochs to Sell Scott Walker

Saying that “things just didn’t work out,” the billionaire Koch brothers have decided to put Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker up for sale.

The Kochs, who earlier had purchased Gov. Walker with great fanfare, announced their plan to sell the politician in a terse statement from Koch Industries headquarters in Wichita.

“Scott Walker is a fine individual, and we wish him well,” the Kochs’ statement read. “We are confident that he will be a good fit for some other billionaire industrialists.”

In Iowa, an aide to Walker said that the Governor was “still processing” the news that he had been put up for sale. “It takes a while for Scott to understand things,” the aide said.

Elsewhere: As America’s bridges, roads, and other infrastructure dangerously deteriorate from decades of neglect, there is a mounting sense of urgency that it is time to build a giant wall.

Harland Dorrinson, the executive director of a Washington-based think tank called the Center for Responsible Immigration, believes that most Americans favor the building of border walls over extravagant pet projects like structurally sound freeway overpasses.

While some think that America’s declining infrastructure is a national-security threat, Dorrinson strongly disagrees. “If immigrants somehow get over the wall, the condition of our bridges and roads will keep them from getting very far,” he said. Read more at http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/

2. Poll: Trump Supporters Think Obama is A Muslim Born in Another Country

A new Quinnipiac University poll shows Hillary Clinton coasting to a crushing victory in a three-way race against Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, winning 45 percent of the vote, compared with 22 for Sanders and 18 for Biden.

And the good news for Clinton doesn’t stop there.

— The poll shows Clinton beating Jeb Bush head to head.

— The poll shows Clinton beating Marco Rubio head to head.

— The poll shows Clinton beating Donald Trump head to head.

— The poll shows Clinton winning in a landslide in scenarios where Trump runs as an independent.

So how did the media report this poll showing that if the election were held this week Hillary Clinton would win? Well, as bad news for Hillary Clinton!

Bloomberg: “Biden More Competitive Than Clinton Against Leading Republicans: Poll”

Two things are happening here. One is that “Clinton is still winning” is a boring headline, so there’s a tendency to grasp at straws to come up with something else. The other is that the press as a whole doesn’t like Clinton very much (and the feeling is mutual), so there’s a bias toward believing that the public feels the same way. So somehow her campaign is struggling even when it’s winning, and polls that show her winning are reported as showing her losing. — Matthew Yglesias 8/27/15 http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9214461/clinton-poll-lead

I found it surprising that somebody as high ranking as secretary of state, who’s dealing with classified and sensitive information all the time, would think that it was OK to have a private server in your phone where you put information and so forth — where you send emails. — Dick Cheney on CNN. 8/31/15

VERSUS

“To complement the official State Department computer in my office, I installed a laptop computer on a private line. My personal email account on the laptop allowed me direct access to anyone online. I started shooting emails to my principal assistants, to individual ambassadors, and increasingly to my foreign-minister colleagues who like me were trying to bring their ministries into the 186,000-miles-per-second world.” — Former Sec. of State Colin Powell, in his book “It Worked For Me: In Life And Leadership.”

Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server at the State Department is a criminal problem.” — Donald Trump8/15/15

VERSUS

“Her decision not to segregate her email accounts was regrettable, but unlike the actions and prosecution of Petraeus, there has been no evidence of criminal conduct.” — Petraeus prosecutor Anne M. Tompkins 8/31/15

Fully, 53% have an unfavorable impression of Hillary Clinton, the highest since April 2008 in Post-ABC surveys. That mark is eight percentage points higher than in July, though not as far from a Post-ABC poll in late May (49%).” — The Fix 9/02/15

VERSUS

“But it also shows something else: Clinton continues to be popular among a broad coalition of Democrats, and is still better liked than GOP heavyweights Donald Trump and Jeb Bush with the public at large.” —The Fix 9/02/15

8. Pollsters Dumbfounded by Trump

Polling experts agree on one thing when it comes to Donald Trump’s presidential run: They’ve never seen anything like it.

The billionaire businessman’s dominance of the Republican presidential race is forcing experienced political hands to question whether everything they know about winning the White House is wrong.

The shocks have come in quick succession, with Trump first rocketing to the top of national polls, and then taking double-digit leads in the early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

“Today is a special day. Today is women’s equality day. Donald Trump calls it, that time of the year again.” –Conan O’Brien

“At a press conference yesterday, Donald Trump kicked out a Latino reporter but the man returned a few minutes later. Yeah, so already Trump’s deportation plan isn’t working.” –Conan O’Brien

“Donald Trump presided over a rally in Dubuc, Iowa, where he touted his strong skills as a negotiator and showed off his considerable skills as an impressionist. I don’t know if Donald Trump will make America great again but he has certainly made CNN great again.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Donald Trump got into it with a well-respected Spanish language news anchor, Jorge Ramos from Univision, who made Donald upset when he tried to ask a question. ‘Go back to Univision,’ he said as he kicked him out of the place. He’s not even president yet and he’s already kicking Mexicans out.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“It’s come out that Donald Trump’s grandfather owned a brothel. When reached for comment Trump said, screwing people for money is a long family tradition.” –Conan O’Brien

“There was a time when it seemed unimaginable that Joe Biden could ever be taken seriously enough to win his party’s nomination, but Donald Trump just blew that idea right out the window.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“A lot of people are upset because Jeb Bush used the term ‘anchor babies’ to describe children born of illegal immigrants. Calling a child an anchor baby is almost as derogatory as calling a child Jeb. But he was in McAllen, Texas, defending himself, reminding everyone that his wife is Mexican. You don’t mention that your wife is Mexican as much as Jeb Bush.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Bill Gates alone, lost $3.2 billion on the stock market yesterday. To put that in perspective, that’s like a regular person losing a dollar in a vending machine.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“The CEO of Starbucks sent the message to Starbucks employees yesterday, instructing them to be sensitive to customers who might be feeling stressed out about the market. I like that the place that charges $5 for a cup of coffee is concerned about our finances.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Donald Trump had a rally at a football stadium in Mobile, Alabama, after planning to have it in a hotel ballroom. It got too big for the ballroom, so they moved it to the convention center. It got too big for the convention center, so they moved it to a football stadium. Apparently the strategy of saying whatever crazy thing pops into your head is really paying off for him.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“President-elect Trump discusses all of the big issues, China, opponents, Univision, Mexico, Oreos … everything. He even talked about the weather and how the weather might affect his hair. ‘You know if it rains I will take off my hat and I will prove, I will prove once and for all that it’s mine. Okay.’ Sounds good to me. Why not just dip it in a bucket? You don’t have to wait for the rain.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Jeb Bush has photo shopped a photo for an ad which gives him a black left hand and a much different looking body. Jeb just can’t get it right. I wonder if his black hand handshake is different from the white hand handshake.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“In an interview this week, Jeb Bush said that if he had a magic wand, there are at least ten things that he would like change about the Constitution. Then Jeb Bush was given the prize for ‘lamest use of a magic wand.'” –Jimmy Fallon

“Donald Trump had an interview with CNN in the lobby of the Trump Tower Hotel this week, and apparently someone yelled, ‘You’ll never win the Latino vote.’ And then immediately, Trump had the guy deported over to La Quinta Hotel.” –Jimmy Fallon

Donald Trump “is turning the schoolyard taunt into a political art form – these aren’t gaffes or off-script asides. They are part of a strategy, people close to Mr. Trump say, of knocking his Republican presidential rivals off their game. That, at least for now, is getting him the attention and poll ratings he wants among voters looking for an antidote to the artifice of U.S. politics.”

Trump’s candidacy has already left a durable mark, expanding the discourse of hate such that, in the midst of his feuds and provocations, we barely even registered that Senator Ted Cruz had called the sitting President “the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism,” or that Senator Marco Rubio had redoubled his opposition to abortion in cases of rape, incest, or a mortal threat to the mother. Trump has bequeathed a concoction of celebrity, wealth, and alienation that is more potent than any we’ve seen before. If, as the Republican establishment hopes, the stargazers eventually defect, Trump will be left with the hardest core—the portion of the electorate that is drifting deeper into unreality, with no reconciliation in sight. 8/31/15 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-fearful-and-the-frustrated

The important thing to understand about the politics of what’s happening now is this: There is nothing—nothing—that Hillary Clinton could have said or done differently since this became a public issue that could have made this go away, or that she could do now to “put it to rest.”

That’s not because it’s such a dreadfully serious issue, or because the American people care so deeply about the question of State Department email security that they’d never elect anyone to the White House who exercised anything less than the greatest of care with their communications, adhering to not just the spirit but the letter of every regulation. If you asked most voters what this is all about, they’d probably say “Um … something about emails?” No, it’s because Hillary Clinton is Hillary Clinton, and because she’s running for president.

That means that Republicans will never be satisfied with any answer she gives on this topic, or any other for that matter. She could read Trey Gowdy every email she ever wrote while giving him a foot massage, and it wouldn’t change their conviction that there was still something nefarious hidden somewhere in something they hadn’t seen. She could have personally delivered her server to Roger Ailes’s office on the day the story broke, and it wouldn’t change their determination to figure out what she’s hiding.

Multiple investigations of what occurred in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, have shown that it was a terrible tragedy, but there was no “stand-down order,” there was no criminal negligence, and there was no impeachment-worthy malfeasance, no matter how fervently Republicans might wish it. Yet their investigations go on. In fact, at this point it’s impossible to see how anything other than Clinton losing the 2016 election will ever stop them. If she becomes president, they’ll go on investigating it for the length of her time in the Oval Office. 8 31/15 http://prospect.org/article/why-nothing-can-quell-medias-addiction-clinton-scandals

The dramatic shootings that make the news remind us that guns are not noble instruments of freedom; they are highly dangerous machines that have some legitimate uses and many illegitimate ones. Any rational government would carefully regulate them. Instead, our leaders have declined to fix obvious loopholes in background-check systems, refused to ban wholly unnecessary high-capacity magazines, thwarted efforts to study the effects of having a society saturated with firearms and generally cowered before the lobbying might of a political fringe.

The question, posed by both Clinton and her Republican rivals, is whether it’s more extreme for the government to subsidize abortion and Planned Parenthood, which uses its private funding for abortion services, or for the government to ban abortion and deny funding to groups like Planned Parenthood that are otherwise eligible for grants because they are engaged in providing abortion services.

This battle has tremendous implications for the 2016 presidential election, the outcome of which will make a big difference in how the US deals with abortion and funding for women’s health clinics.

5. Dean Obeidallah: Behind Trump, the GOP Really Is Becoming the Racist Party

We are, seeing a bone chilling attraction to Trump by white nationalist groups. It’s almost like they view Trump’s candidacy as their last stand against the changing demographics of America. He’s become the poster child for their philosophy that “White Lives Matter More.”

The issue is not just that these hate groups see something they like in Trump. These groups have the right to endorse anyone they like. The more alarming issue is Trump’s failure to publicly to condemn them.

Many people I respect have voiced concerns about this agreement, but I believe the administration has provided solid answers to their questions. It troubles me that many opponents came out against the JCPOA before even reading the text.

The advocates for a vote of disapproval in Congress have also not put forward a viable alternative or any plan to deal with the consequences of rejection. And make no mistake, those consequences would be grave.

Rejection of this accord would leave the United States isolated and Iranian hardliners empowered. It would be practically impossible to reassemble the coalition that united against Iran’s nuclear activities and imposed the robust sanctions regime that brought Iran to the table. Many of our tools of influence in the region would be rendered useless, and it would hurt our ability to lead on a range of pressing global issues.

Rejection of this agreement would be a strategic setback for the United States, one that our rivals and adversaries would not ignore.

In a turbulent Middle East, there is no way to predict what the next decade will bring. But the United States will be in a far better position to shape events in the region with this nuclear agreement in place than without it. This accord is a bold stroke of diplomacy, and an opportunity we must not waste. 8/31/15 http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/31/opinions/albright-iran-deal-diplomacy/index.html

7. Robert Creamer: Out of Touch Punditry Should Get a Grip — Hillary’s Email Is Non-Story

A message to the out-of-touch Washington pundit class: get a grip. What was or was not on Hillary Clinton’s email server when she was Secretary of State is not a game-changing news story.

In fact, no one outside the chattering class — and right-wing true believers — could give a rat’s rear about this story — and there is a good reason: there is no “there” there. If someone really thinks the great “email” story — or the Benghazi investigation — are going to sink her candidacy, I’ve got a bridge to sell them.

At the time Ms. Clinton was Secretary of State there was no prohibition against the Secretary of State having a private email server. In fact, no Secretary of State before Ms. Clinton had a government email account.

None of the emails on the Secretary’s personal account were classified at the time they were sent or received. That is not in dispute. There is an on-going controversy between various agencies of what ought to be classified in retrospect as the material is released to the public by the State Department, but that does not change the fact that none of it was classified at the time. In fact, one of the several emails at issue actually says the word “unclassified” in the upper left hand corner and can still be accessed by the general public on the State Department web site.

Finally, no one has ever pointed to an instance where the fact that something was on her server instead of a government server had any negative consequences whatsoever.

Remember way back to two weeks ago when the Donald Trump candidacy was the best thing to ever happen to Jeb Bush?

The billionaire business mogul would distract the other contenders for the nomination, the Bush team assured pundits all over Washington. Trump is “other people’s problem,” declared Mike Murphy, chief strategist of the pro-Bush Super PAC Right to Rise. The Donald would allow Jeb to just keep on chugging along. Bush would become the safe and responsible brand—the Honda Odyssey of 2016—to which panicked Republicans would eventually flock.

That didn’t last long. A week after boasting that it would ignore Trump, with its usual Clouseau-like finesse, JebWorld decided to hit Trump every day. Which means every GOP candidate is now playing Donald Trump’s game instead of their own—and doing about as well as you’d expect.

The decision to engage him has outsized consequences for the GOP “brand,” whatever that is these days. Not since Joan Collins sauntered onto the set of “Dynasty” or Gary Coleman uttered his first “Whatch talkin’ about, Willis,” has anyone so dominated a universe as Donald Trump has the GOP. Trump single-handedly has moved the GOP to the right on immigration, to the left on free trade and in circles on pretty much everything else. He has the other candidates so confused that they are stepping all over their own messages. After all, how else can one explain Bush’s latest effort to show he is not an establishment loser by going flaunting an endorsement from Eric Cantor, the most notorious establishment loser in history? 08/30/15 http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/donald-trump-2016-setting-gop-agenda-213088

The catalyst for the current eruption of anti-foreigner bombast is, of course, Republican front-runner Donald Trump. His rhetoric blaming undocumented Mexicans for a crime wave and insisting — without a shred of evidence — that the Mexican government is deliberately sending miscreants across the border has struck a nerve. What Trump says about immigration is nonsense and his proposed remedies are infeasible. Yet GOP voters are eating it up.

Among Trump’s rivals, only Bush is forcefully pushing back. “He wants everyone deported, which would tear family lives asunder,” Bush said Sunday. “It’s not conservative and it’s not realistic and it does not embrace American values.”

But as long as other candidates are competing to sound tougher-than-thou, as long as the conversation is about how high to build new walls and blame is ascribed to immigrants for not assimilating quickly enough, the GOP is digging itself a hole that will be hard to escape.

This site contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use,’ you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. “Go to Original” links are provided as a convenience to allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “Go to Original” links.

“This email thing, it has kind of a mystique to it. You know, an email is just an utterance in digital form. But it has some kind of dark energy that gets everybody excited. It’s almost like a vampire. She’s going to have to find a stake and put it right through the heart of these emails in some way.” — Gov. Jerry Brown 8/21/15

“Americans expect Congress to help keep our country strong and growing – not threaten to shut down our government. When Congress gets back, they should prevent a shutdown, pass a responsible budget, and prove that this is a country that looks forward – a country that invests in our future, and keeps our economy growing for all Americans.” — President Obama in his weekly address 8/22/15

“The ‘classification’ [of Hillary Clinton’s emails] has become an administrative tug of war which occurred long after the emails were sent: should some information that was not considered classified at the time now be re-designated as classified? And if that happens, should Hillary be in trouble for discussing classified information on her personal email server by some sort of time warp logic because some government officials now think these documents should be classified differently.” — Josh Marshall 8/21/15

“My generation is on the sidelines of policy making now; this is a natural development. But decades of experience strongly suggest that there are epochal moments that should not be squandered. President Nixon realized it with China. Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush realized it with the Soviet Union. And I believe we face it with Iran today.” — Brent Scowcroft, urging the Congress to support the Iran nuclear deal. 8/21/15

“We live in a nation in which a handful of very, very wealthy people have extraordinary power over our economy and our political life and the media. They are very, very powerful and many of them are extremely greedy. For the life of me, I will never understand how a family like the Koch brothers, worth $85 billion, apparently think that’s not enough money.” — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). 5/23/15

“The email story may not be the most ridiculous fake scandal in the history of the Clintons, because there’s a lot of competition for that title. As has often been the case, it was a poor decision Hillary Clinton made that got the scandal ball rolling. But there are only so many times you can ask “What is she hiding???” before you have to come up with something that she might actually be hiding.” — Paul Waldman 8/19/15

“Trump has certainly crafted an appeal to voters who like impractical ideas. But his true threat lies in the fact that Trump himself is crazy — not just ideologically, though he is certainly that as well, but in the sense that he lacks any rational connection between his actions and his goals, to the extent that his goals are discernible at all. That is also his downfall.” — Jonathan Chait 8/26/15

“Donald Trump is the political equivalent of chaff, a billion shiny objects all floating through the sky at once, ephemeral, practically without substance, serving almost exclusively to distract from more important things – yet nonetheless completely impossible to ignore.” — Leon H. Wolf in Red State 8/25/15

“Twenty-five percent of our party that probably thinks Obama was born in Kenya or wants to believe that. There’s 25 percent of our party wants him to be a Muslim because they hate him so much. So, there’s a dark side of politics that Mr. Trump is appealing to.” — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) 8/25/15.

Trump’s casual relationship with facts and workable policy is actually most likely part of his appeal. This poses fresh challenges for the media — not just Ramos-style questioners — and also for his rivals. The games may be rigged, but few in the audience can claim they didn’t get their money’s worth. And Trump, of course, owns the ballpark, and is trying to buy the league.” — ABC’s Rick Klein 8/26/15

“It’s the ones who won’t win anyway, I suppose, who can take the gloves off. Those who have a chance of winning don’t want to engage with a megalomaniac with a billion dollars.” — Iowan Republican, Doug Gross. 8/20/15

“You know, if this were another country, we could maybe call for an expedited election, right? I would love that. Can we do that? I’d like to have the election tomorrow, I don’t want to wait.” — Donald Trump, 8/21/15 The Hill.

“Yes, Donald Trump, America’s great Irish hope, unveiled his immigration plan this week — and it is yuge. It’s a three-point plan called Cinco de Bye-o. Here are the plans: repeal the 14th amendment, seize the wages of illegal immigrants who are working here, use that money to build a wall, and then deport all 11 million of them. Is any of this possible? No. But it gave millions of Fox News viewers their first erection in years.” — Bill Maher (video) 8/21/15

Trump is not only successfully dashing the 2016 hopes of the GOP, he’s also putting a target on Latinos. And unfortunately, he’s catering to the basest instincts of the least measured segment of our citizenry. Trump is unleashing a destructive fervor that’s taking on a life of its own and even the Republican establishment—with all its billions and billions of dollars—can’t put a muzzle on it.” — Kerry Eleveld in the Daily Kos 8/22/15

“If Trump is nominated, then everything we think we know about presidential nominations is wrong.” — Larry Sabato, 8/22/15.

“Trump is breaking every convention of presidential politics—flaunting his unapologetically egotistical, politically incorrect style—and baffling pundits in the process. Trump is often lampooned for this, but maybe the joke’s on everyone else. His grandiosity appears to be working.” — Brian Resnick in the NationalJournal 8/20/15

“Trump could explode at any moment in a fiery orange ball. But meanwhile, he has exploded the hoary conventions, money-grubbing advisers and fund-raising excesses of the presidential campaign, turning everything upside down, inside out, into sauerkraut.” — Maureen Dowd 8/23/15

“Hopefully, he’s going to sit there and say, ‘When I become elected president, what we’re going to do is we’re going to make the border a vacation spot, it’s going to cost you $25 for a permit, and then you get $50 for every confirmed kill. That’d be one nice thing.” — Jim Sherota, an attendee at Trump’s Alabama rally. 8/21/15

1.The DAILY GRILL

“I for one don’t think Planned Parenthood ought to get a penny, though, and that’s the difference. Because they’re not actually doing women’s health issues. They’re involved in something way different than that.” — Jeb Bush calling to defund Planned Parenthood. (Video) 8/25/15

VERSUS

“More than 4.4 million sexually transmitted infection tests or treatments in 2012, including HIV testing, doesn’t count as women’s health. Neither do 2.1 million women who received reversible contraception. Nearly half a million Pap tests and more than half a million breast exams. None of this is women’s health, says Jeb Bush, noted women’s health expert.” — Laura Clawson in the Daily Kos 8/25/15

A Boston man told police that he beat and urinated on a homeless man early Wednesday because the man was Hispanic, then justified the assault by telling police that “Donald Trump was right — all these illegals need to be deported.” — Boston Globe 8/20/15

VERSUS

“I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that.” — Trump, when told of the alleged assault.

“There ought to be greater enforcement … so that you don’t have these, you know, ‘anchor babies,’ as they’re described, coming into the country. … frankly, it’s more related to Asian people” — Jeb Bush 8//19/15

‘The beautiful Heidi Klum is on the show tonight. Donald Trump was actually quoted as saying that Heidi is ‘no longer a 10.’ Heidi said the comment didn’t bother her, especially coming from someone who was never even a 4.’ –Jimmy Fallon

“Trump recently said he won’t eat Oreos anymore because the company that makes them moved to Mexico. Then Chris Christie said, ‘Does that mean I can start dipping them in salsa?'” –Jimmy Fallon

“A new CNN poll shows that Donald Trump is within six points of Hillary Clinton. It’s the closest Trump has ever gotten to a woman over 40.” –Seth Meyers

“Apparently President Obama’s favorite cocktail is a martini. When asked how he likes it, he said, ‘On the beach, in Hawaii, in 2017.'” –Jimmy Fallon

“This week the Obama administration warned China to remove its secret agents from the U.S. Then in the middle of Obama’s announcement a plant behind him got up and walked away.” –Jimmy Fallon

“Donald Trump unveiled his immigration policy and now he’s getting a lot of flak. His policy would have prevented his own grandfather from coming to America. That explains his new campaign slogan: ‘Vote Trump to prevent another Trump.'” –Conan O’Brien

“Donald Trump is the grandson of German immigrants. Don’t worry. The last time a German guy with crazy hair took over a country, everything turned out fine.” –Conan O’Brien

“A new CNN poll shows that Carly Fiorina has pushed Chris Christie out of the top 10 for the Republican nomination. Unfortunately, she threw her back out doing it.” –Seth Meyers

“There are reports that if Joe Biden runs for president, he would promise to serve for only one term — because nothing says confidence like promising your presidency would be over quickly.” –Jimmy Fallon

“Chris Christie said he will top Donald Trump’s Iowa State Fair helicopter entrance by riding in on a pony. As a result, all the ponies in Iowa have gone into hiding.” –Conan O’Brien

“Donald Trump was photographed at the Iowa State Fair eating a pork chop on a stick. That’s what I love about America. You can fly on a private jet and eat at five-star restaurants. But if you want to be president, when they hand you a pork chop on a stick in Iowa, you have to eat it.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“Donald Trump’s new policy paper would not give automatic citizenship to children born in America if they have foreign parents. Said Trump, ‘It’s nothing personal, Sasha and Malia.'” –Seth Meyers

5. Et tu, NPR?

An NPR article on the government inquiry into classified emails cited two former government officials to criticize Hillary Clinton’s handling of her private email server when she was secretary of state. However, the article did not disclose that the former officials have conservative ties, with one of them advising GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush.

In the article, NPR extensively quoted Ron Hosko, who was identified only as previously leading “the FBI’s criminal investigative division.” Hosko suggested that emails which were sent to Clinton — and which have since been retroactively classified in an interagency dispute over classification levels — might represent “serious breaches of national security”:

NPR did not mention that Hosko is currently the president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF), a right-wing non-profit that claims to defend police officers fighting criminal charges, but which has come under scrutiny for financial ties to other conservative groups, such as the Federalist Society and the American Spectator.

With U.S. Presidential elections now costing more than five billion dollars, there must be a cheaper way to find the worst people in the country, experts believe.

According to Davis Logsdon, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, the United States could use current technology to find the nation’s most reprehensible people at a fraction of the five-billion-dollar price tag.

“Any search for the worst people in the country should logically begin one place: on Twitter,” said Logsdon, who recommends scouring the social network for users who consistently show signs of narcissistic-personality disorder, poor impulse control, and other traits common to odious people.

Once a comprehensive list of those Twitter users is compiled, Logsdon said, it could be cross-referenced with a database containing the names of people who have presided over spectacular business failures, have been the target of multiple ethics probes, or are currently under indictment for a broad array of criminal offenses.

All in all, Logsdon believes that his method for finding the nation’s worst people would cost practically nothing, leaving five billion dollars left over to help rebuild the nation’s schools, roads, and other crumbling infrastructure.

The political scientist expects to encounter significant resistance to his proposal, however. “It’s hard to imagine a new system finding worse people than our current one does,” he admitted. Read more at http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/

An explosive confrontation brewing between the House Republican leadership and conservatives over Planned Parenthood is threatening to shut down the government for the second time in three years. And House GOP leaders have yet to settle on a strategy to avert it.

Desperate to avoid another closure, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his team would prefer to build bipartisan opposition to funding the group through a series of high-profile Congressional investigations. But, at this point, that seems unlikely to cut it with a bloc of House conservatives who have said they simply won’t vote for a large-scale spending plan that funds Planned Parenthood. 8/25/15 Read more at http://www.politico.com/story/2015/08/house-gop-leaders-congress-avoid-shutdown-government-121687.html

OPINION

1. Betsy Woodruff: Why Evangelicals Worship Trump

Trump has been courting the evangelical vote for quite some time. The Donald J. Trump Foundation has made donations to evangelical groups like Iowa’s The Family Leader ($10,000 in 2013), Samaritan’s Purse ($10,000 in 2013) and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association ($100,000 in 2012), according to IRS forms posted on Guidestar.org.

But beyond the financial investment, the conservative Christian voters who play a key role in helping Republican candidates win primaries and general elections like him for some pretty understandable reasons. And that helps explain why his candidacy has had staying power that leaves many beltway graybeards scratching their heads—and why he could be an even bigger problem for the Republican establishment than some expect.

A clever observer could have foretold all of this by watching Trump’s appearance at Liberty University on September 24, 2012. The college—a powerhouse of conservative influence where virtually every Republican presidential contender speaks—invited Trump to deliver one of their convocation addresses, and he agreed, taking care to note that he waived his classy, hefty, yuuuge speaking fee.

Jerry Falwell Jr., the son of the college’s late founder, Jerry Falwell, introduced Trump to raucous applause, calling him “one of the great visionaries of our time.”

No cage filled with parrots could have recited the list of familiar anti-Hillary talking points more efficiently than Diane Rehm’s guests.

The email flap, opined the Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “creates and feeds into this narrative about the Clintons and Mrs. Clinton that the rules are different for them, that she’s not one of us.”

Most Americans, she added indignantly, “don’t have access to a private email server.”

Actually, most Americans don’t know what a server is, or why the hardware’s supposed to matter. Then, too, most Americans have never been secretary of state, aren’t married to a former president, and don’t enjoy Secret Service protection at home.

Stolberg saw a perception problem, too. Nobody was rude enough to ask her about the perception caused by the Times’ public editor’s conclusion that her own newspaper appeared to have an ax to grind against the Clintons, after it falsely reported that the emails were the object of a criminal investigation.

Which they are not.

Stolberg also complained that both Clintons “play by a separate set of rules, (and) that the normal standards don’t apply.”

Which normal standards? According to, yes, The New York Times:

“When (Clinton) took office in 2009 . . . the State Department allowed the use of home computers as long as they were secure. . . . There appears to have been no prohibition on the exclusive use of a private server; it does not appear to be an option anyone had thought about.”

So why are we talking about this at all? No secretary of state previous to Clinton had a government email account.

Meanwhile, this has to be at least the fourth time the same crowd has predicted her imminent demise, if not her indictment and conviction. All based upon partisan leaks — this Trey Gowdy joker is nothing compared to Kenneth Starr’s leak-o-matic prosecutors — and upon presumed evidence in documents nobody’s yet seen.

Trump’s defenders — and I know because they tell me so online — say they admire him because he is allegedly “anti-establishment.” They are wrong: He isn’t anti-establishment at all. As a vastly wealthy man — one who can invite an ex-secretary of state to his wedding and expect her to come — he lives at the very heart of a certain slice of the establishment. But of course he is different from other politicians in another sense: He is the only presidential candidate who uses, on television, the kind of language normally found in the comment section of a celebrity Web site or the more aggressive Reddit forums. Vulgar insults, racist slurs, manufactured “anger” and invented “facts” are all a normal part of debate in those kinds of public spaces. Thanks to Trump, they have now migrated to presidential politics, too.

Protest candidates are hardly a uniquely American phenomenon. Silvio Berlusconi brought the language and style of Italian tabloid television into the center of Italian politics. Multiple far-right ideologues have brought anger and bombast into European debates. In Britain, the obscurantist far left is having a revival in the form of Jeremy Corbyn, a bearded Marxist — he favors the nationalization of industry and nuclear disarmament — who may well be the next leader of the Labor Party.

All of these candidates appeal to electorates who have strong online ties but don’t hear their views reflected in mainstream politics. Trump falls into that category, too. But instead of the far left or the far right, he speaks for the sarcastic hate-tweeters, the anti-everything nihilists and the conspiracy theorists who write convoluted, anonymous comments at the bottom of news articles. He’s simply taken their outraged feelings out of cyberspace and translated them into real life. 8/21/15 Read more at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-and-the-hate-tweeters/2015/08/21/3c863846-4817-11e5-8e7d-9c033e6745d8_story.html

4. Jamelle Bouie: Not Just Anti-Hispanic

Most of the time, when we talk about immigration, we’re talking about Latin America. Donald Trump isn’t threatening to round up Irish immigrants in Boston who entered the country illegally or to build a wall between us and Canada; he’s threatening Latinos and tapping into an ugly strain of racist nativism. It’s why “anchor baby”—slang for the American-born children of unauthorized immigrants—is such a charged term. To many, it’s racial code for often brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking children.

Of course, rhetoric aside, America’s immigrant community goes beyond Latino and Hispanic Americans. It includes Africans, Europeans, and Asians, one of the fastest growing groups in the country. Not all Asians are tied to the immigrant experience—more than a quarter are native-born, with long and durable ties to the United States. But the large majority are foreign-born, with roots in a variety of different countries, from China and Japan to Korea, Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh. Moreover, they’re a rising share of the electorate—in 1996, just 1.6 percent of voters were Asian. In 2012, it was 3.4 percent. As second- and third-generation Asian Americans take the stage in national life, that voting block will increase.

“I love that he talks like a normal person,” said Kevin Ward, who traveled 35 miles from Pascagoula, Mississippi, for the rally. “Every other politician talks weird, like an alien.” Diana Alston, a woman who had moved to Mobile from St. Louis a decade before, wore a Michael Jackson RIP T-shirt and sat in a walker while breathing through a nasal cannula and an oxygen tank, was wistful when asked to describe what she liked about Trump. “It feels like you know him,” she said. “He’s like your uncle. No one else feels like anyone you’d know, or even meet. Trump feels like one of us.” She gave a conspiratorial wink. “And he’s a good-looking man for 69, if you know what I mean.”

They hate Hillary Clinton, they hate Obama, they hate Jeb Bush, and they hate them all for the same reason: They think they’re lying to them. Many, I found, especially hated Bush for his Spanish-language campaign ads. This came up several times. Bush is “as bad as any of them,” said Tony Hamilton, a truck driver from nearby Pensacola, Florida. “I voted for his brother and his dad, but not him, never. He’s just like the rest of them.” Hamilton, who smoked and drank from a coffee mug emblazoned with “If You Don’t Like Me, Buy A Map, Get A Car And Go To Hell!!!!”, said he’d been waiting to vote for Trump for years, and that he couldn’t understand how Obama had been re-elected. When asked how he thought Obama got elected the first time, Hamilton pointed to his friend Marco. Marco, a security guard in Pensacola who is African-American, just shrugged.

Few of the people in line could summon any specific policies Trump was advocating, other than “build the wall” and “Make America Great Again.” He’s a vessel, a receptacle, as has often been observed, for an inchoate rage. His wealth and celebrity are crucial parts of his political appeal. And he doesn’t even seem to want to be president all that badly.

Ending birthright citizenship used to be an idea embraced on the far right of the House GOP caucus and bandied about by rightwing policy wonks. Trump has now not only made it a signature of his campaign, but he’s also pulling all the other candidates along with him. Now Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham, Scott Walker and others have all joined him.

It is difficult to convey just how mammoth a change this would be or how bad an idea it is. “Birthright citizenship” is at the core of the post-Civil War concept of American citizenship and the whole framework of rights and governance built around it. It’s written into the 14th Amendment! It’s what prevents us from having intergenerational resident non-citizen populations like they do in Germany and so many other countries.

In three years we’ve now gone from the need to support comprehensive immigration reform, to balking on supporting the deal, to embracing the policies that used to be held by the comical likes of Steve King and another couple dozen members of the House have done yeoman work providing a steady stream of radioactive nonsense that even current GOP congressional leadership almost always ignores.

Trump, despite his current lead in the polls, isn’t likely to be the Republican presidential nominee. William Galston, the Wall Street Journal’s designated Democratic pundit, last week suggested that there were five “plausible” Republican candidates — Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.), Govs. Scott Walker (Wis.) and John Kasich (Ohio) and dynast Jeb Bush. In the most recent edition of his 2016 candidate rankings, conservative Charles Krauthammer, while not dismissing Trump, suggests that Walker, Rubio and Bush stand in the first tier of the Republican run-off.

But these “plausible” Republican candidates hold views that are dramatically at odds with interests and values of the vast majority of Americans.

Take climate change. The scientific consensus that human activity is causing extreme and accelerating climate change is virtually unanimous. The Pentagon already terms it a clear and present national security threat.

Yet Rubio continues to be in denial. Saying, “I am not a scientist,” he asserts,“I don’t agree with the notion that . . . there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate.”

Bush admits “the climate is changing,” but says he doesn’t “think the science is clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural.” For a solution, he essentially suggests doing nothing, noting the current trend from coal to natural gas. Then he notes with characteristic clarity, “I don’t think it’s the highest priority. I don’t think we should ignore it either.”

On immigration, both Rubio and Walker were for a path for citizenship before they were against it. Now they have joined the clamor to strengthen the border rather than comprehensive reform. Bush is marginally better, supporting a path to “legal status,” but not citizenship.”

Those are the Republican “plausible” candidates: for more wars abroad, for spending more on the military and less on vital needs at home, for doing nothing about climate change, for sustaining failed trade policies, for cutting Social Security and adding to the growing retirement crisis, for rolling back regulation of Wall Street, for reviving the conservative war on women, gays and immigrants. Galston praises Rubio as “the future of conservatism,” but like Bush and Walker, Rubio advocates a future that would drag us relentlessly back to the failed policies of the past. 8/18/15 Read more at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gops-deeply-flawed-field/2015/08/18/7f26c076-4510-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html

Intelligence officials often argue that information is classified even when the same information can be gleaned from unclassified sources. While still at the Justice Department, I once wrote a draft press release that a Department attorney claimed contained multiple pieces of classified information. He accused me of a grave violation of the rules for handling classified information, instructed me to destroy all copies and threatened to refer me for investigation. But I had drawn the release from unclassified sources and had never even been briefed on this particular underlying secret—how could I possibly have exposed something of which I wasn’t aware?

As ill advised as Secretary Clinton’s decision to operate a private server was, it has nothing to do with the potential classification problems that the intelligence community has raised. The exact same issue would have arisen had she been using an unclassified State Department email account, which, like her personal account, would not have been authorized to receive classified information. Furthermore, the only reason the interagency government committee began reviewing her emails for classification in the first place is because Clinton herself asked that they be released to the public.

If the Justice Department were to broaden this investigation, it would be doing so in the middle of a campaign, at the behest of partisan members of Congress and opposing candidates, with no indication of predicate potential criminal wrongdoing. In this context, it could not credibly investigate Secretary Clinton’s email account without opening similar investigations across the government and exposing thousands of officials to baseless charges of wrongdoing.

What does it take to be a top reality TV star? Extroversion, blind confidence, the willingness to say or do anything to win, and enough of the V factor — villainy — to keep producers happy. On reality TV, swagger and drama are keys to stardom; they help keep you from getting voted off the island — and off the air.

Which, like so many things in this early stage of the 2016 presidential campaign, brings us to Donald Trump. He’s the first candidate to employ the tenets of reality TV in a run for president of the United States, to use a savvy reality contestant’s approach to sticking around and evading elimination rounds. And he certainly had experience in the field, with backstage and onscreen roles in “The Apprentice” shows, the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, and the blueprint for the entire reality TV genre, WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment), where theatricality is king.

So far, it’s working brilliantly, as Trump continues to prevail at “Survivor: D.C.” tribal councils to become the leader of recent polls in the Republican race.

But playing “made you look” with America isn’t the same as running America. The presidential campaign only looks like a reality competition, a face-off among personality types. The candidates only look like contestants. On a deeper and more critical level, it’s an interview process for a job, with America doing the choosing.

It is media malpractice to treat the election of our next leader as a blood sport, reality television show, freak show or sporting event and refuse to treat voters as serious people concerned about serious issues. This disrespect of voters cheats voters by denying them the kind of campaign they deserve, and it accounts for the humiliating low trust levels that voters demonstrate toward the media.

It is unprofessional, wrong and causes further public distrust of the media when media malpractice legitimizes a partisan attempt to falsely turn what the candidate has acknowledged was a mistake first into a scandal, and then into a crime.

The malpractice is magnified again when reporters shout perp-walk-style questions to a candidate about a criminal investigation that does not exist and will not happen, and then offer, instead of objective analysis of the facts, their theatrical evaluation of the candidate’s rhetorical charm when faced with this media malpractice mayhem.

It is media malpractice turned into farce when commentators suggest that a CNN poll showing the Democratic candidate winning by 6 percent to 10 points is in trouble and that the Republican candidates losing by 6 percent to 10 points are doing well.

Does Hillary Clinton’s campaign have challenges? Yes, you can bet your pants suit it does. But there is not one Republican candidate who would not trade places with her strength in the campaign for the nomination and general election. Any GOP candidate who claims otherwise is bearing false witness, and anyone who reports otherwise is guilty of one more moment of media malpractice. 8/20/15 Read more at http://thehill.com/opinion/brent-budowsky/251614-budowsky-hillary-vs-media-malpractice

12. Joseph Cirincione: What happens if the Senate rejects the Iran deal?

The nuclear agreement with Iran is supported by almost every nation in the world. It has the backing of nearly the entire American security establishment, current and retired. It enjoys the overwhelming support of nuclear scientists and policy experts. There is no credible alternative.

And yet, with almost a month to go before the vote, lobbying against the deal is intense. No Republican senator supports the agreement. Two prominent Democratic senators, Charles Schumer and Robert Menendez, have denounced it.

If the Senate follows their lead and kills the deal, it will spell humiliation for the United States, an unconstrained Iranian nuclear program and the increased risk of a new war in the Middle East.

Here is how rejection would play out.

First, our allies would desert us. This is not just an agreement struck between the United States and Iran. It is a deal negotiated over two years by the world powers. America led the way, but Russia, China, the conservative governments of Britain, France and Germany, and the entire European Union were equal partners. Everyone had to agree on every term or there would have been no deal.

Opponents spin fanciful notions of a “better deal” with tougher terms, bigger sticks. This is nonsense. Our European partners have already told us that it is this option or nothing. If Congress blocks the deal, no nation, least of all Iran, will believe that the United States is capable of making and keeping a new agreement. U.S. credibility would collapse faster than the Chinese stock market.

Earlier this week, when Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson blew up Twitter by calling for undocumented immigrants to become “property of the state” and put into “compelled labor.” When a caller challenged the idea, Mickelson answered, “What’s wrong with slavery?”

Why there’s suddenly this surge of hatred for immigrants is sort of a mystery. Why Donald Trump, who’s probably never even interacted with an undocumented immigrant in a non-commercial capacity, in particular should care so much about this issue is even more obscure. (Did he trip over an immigrant on his way to the Cincinnati housing development his father gave him as a young man?)

Most likely, immigrants are just collateral damage in Trump’s performance art routine, which is an absurd ritualistic celebration of the coiffed hotshot endlessly triumphing over dirty losers and weaklings.

Trump isn’t really a politician, of course. He’s a strongman act, a ridiculous parody of a Nietzschean superman. His followers get off on watching this guy with (allegedly) $10 billion and a busty mute broad on his arm defy every political and social convention and get away with it.

People are tired of rules and tired of having to pay lip service to decorum. They want to stop having to watch what they say and think and just get “crazy,” as Thomas Friedman would put it.

Trump’s campaign is giving people permission to do just that. It’s hard to say this word in conjunction with such a sexually unappealing person, but his message is a powerful aphrodisiac. Fuck everything, fuck everyone. Fuck immigrants and fuck their filthy lice-ridden kids. And fuck you if you don’t like me saying so.

The oddest thing about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator seeking Democratic nomination for President, is not his distaste for fund-raising, his insistence that he is a “democratic Socialist,” or even his unofficial slogan, “Feel the Bern,” a phrase that vividly recalls Jane Fonda at the moment of her disentanglement from the New Left. It is his popularity with kids. Since tossing his worn cap into the ring, in April, Sanders has racked up a disproportionate share of the youth vote: thirty-seven per cent of voters twenty-nine or younger, compared with Hillary Clinton’s forty per cent, in one poll. Why? Outwardly, he does not seem like a particularly hip or youthful guy. Sanders is nearly seventy-four, dresses like Willy Loman, and can name, from direct memory, the Dodgers’ lineup in the year 1951. When he shows up at events, his fleecy hair, or what remains of it, looks ravaged, as if he had puttered all the way there in a drop-top Model T. He wears a watch; it’s not by Apple. And yet, today, Sanders boasts a larger Facebook following than Clinton and Jeb Bush combined.

It’s on Facebook that Sanders fandom, and a language associated with it, has flourished. Followers post about the way he “slayed” in this or that speech, how he seems “so logical” compared with other politicians, how he motivated them to vote, for the first time, in their late twenties. As Sanders, an independent, throttled into a strong second place for the Democratic nomination, Bern-ers on Twitter praised him as “clever” and “trustworthy.” In the magazine last week, Daniel Wenger reported on an eighteen-year-old kid’s attempt to organize a Sanders YouTube viewing party in his parents’ living room. On Friday, in a greater coup, Sanders received the endorsement of the fifteen-year-old prank candidate Deez Nuts, who made a splash in some Midwestern polls earlier this month, and who cited his frank and accessible style. Queried about Sanders’s leading opponent in the race, Hillary Clinton, Mr. Nuts simply asked, “Why can’t you be more open and friendly like Bernie?” 8/25/15 Read more at http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/feeling-the-bern-with-the-youth-vote

15. Rep. Linda Sanchez: When it comes to the politics of immigration, the GOP’s candidates are sinvergüenzas — shameless

As someone who was born in the United States to immigrant parents, I find the phrase “anchor babies” — used by Jeb Bush, Donald Trump and other Republican candidates to describe American-born children of immigrants — incredibly offensive. And the word that keeps coming to mind is the Spanish term, sinvergüenza, which refers to someone utterly without embarrassment or shame. And right now, to many Latinos, the term is synonymous with another word: Republican.

It’s shameful how the GOP field has perpetuated the ugly myth of a swarm of Mexican women crossing the border to have their children in this country and manipulate the immigration system — an absurd characterization that’s not supported by the facts. The reality is that American-born babies, who are U.S. citizens, cannot petition for their parents to gain legal immigration status until they are 21 years old. Not exactly the shortcut to citizenship Republicans claim it is.

Donald Trump has reignited his sexist harassment campaign against Megyn Kelly, and the folks at Fox News are, in seemingly coordinated fashion, striking back. Fellow Fox News hosts and pundits are asking Trump to cool it, and even Roger Ailes has released a statement calling Trump’s abuse “unacceptable” and “disturbing.” It’s almost touching, watching all these conservative media people who usually profit at peddling sexism choose, this time at least, to join together in an effort to stop this one particular instance of it.

It’s also going to backfire.

Conservative media and Fox News in particular have spent years – decades, if you count talk radio – training their audiences to believe that exhortations against sexism and racism are nothing but the “political correctness” police trying to kill your good time. Indeed, one reason that Trump was able to get so much attention for his presidential run in the first place is that Fox has spent years building him up, knowing that their audience enjoys vicariously needling imagined liberals and feminists with his loud-mouthed insult comic act.“Bossy” women are treated, in conservative media, like the great Darth Vaders of the world who need to be harassed and resisted and abused at all costs. Of this, there can be no doubt. Michelle Obama started a program to encourage exercise and healthy eating, and conservative media reacted like she was holding a gun to your dog’s head and telling you to eat broccoli or the pooch gets it. The news that women sometimes make more money than their husbands was treated like a national emergency on Fox, with Lou Dobbs suggesting that “society” is “dissolv[ing] around us” and Erick Erickson arguing that women’s inability to stay in our place is “tearing us apart.” The possibility of women being Army Rangers has created a similar meltdown at the network, with Andrea Tantaros whining, “men can’t have anything to themselves anymore.”

This site contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use,’ you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. “Go to Original” links are provided as a convenience to allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “Go to Original” links.

“It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. Senators and congress members.” – Former President Jimmy Carter. 8/03/15.

“Their ruling really says anybody can marry anybody — and eventually it will be in any combination. I had a strong, Christian lawyer tell me yesterday that, under this decision that he has read, what it brings about is: It only requires one human being in this relationship — that you could marry your lawnmower with this decision. I think he’s right.” Rep. Steve King (R-IA)

“She couldn’t run a Fortune 500 company and now she wants to be president of the United States? She got fired. Obviously her board of directors did not think she was doing a very good job.” — DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Carly Fiorino’s tenure as CEO at HP, during which the stock lost half its value and “tens of thousands of people” lost their jobs. 7/28/15

I’ve got a record in Florida. I’m proud of my dad, and I’m certainly proud of my brother. In Florida, they called me Jeb, because I earned it. — Jeb Bush taking credit for his name! 8/07/15

“Donald Trump proved something last night. Fox News threw everything they had at him, they did it on national television, and he didn’t flinch. Donald Trump proved that you cannot embarrass Donald Trump. He is a man who lives entirely without shame or self-doubt. It’s like a superpower. And every time he refuses to back down, every time he shows what you can do and say if you have no shame, his supporters thrill to him a little more. After all, if the media can’t stop him, then what chance do the Democrats have? What chance do America’s enemies have? — Ezra Klein 8/06/15

“There’s an unspoken accord between Trump and his supporters that Thursday’s debate can only have intensified. Trump rants and raves in language that upsets and scandalizes the establishment. In return, his fans annoy the elite know-it-alls by rallying to him anyway. Together, they raise a big middle finger to everyone. That’s the art of the deal.” — Joshua Green 8/07/15

“The word came down [from Roger Ailes], ‘Get Trump! Kill this fucking Rosemary’s Baby monster in its black crib! I swear, that’s exactly what he said. So, they let Trump speak three times more than anybody else—and he did. He revealed himself to be nasty, boorish, sexist, ignorant, smug. What they forgot is that’s what the Republicans love about him!” — Bill Maher. 8.07.15

“Everything is being placed in jeopardy by the antics of Mr. Trump and we’re at a crossroads as a party. The good news is that 24 million people watched the Republican debate. The bad news is that 24 million people watched the Republican debate.” — Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) 8/08/15

“Do you have any idea what year it is? Did you fall down, hit your head, and think you woke up in the 1950s or the 1890s? Should we call for a doctor? Because I simply cannot believe that in the year 2015, the United States Senate would be spending its time trying to defund women’s health care centers. You know, on second thought, maybe I shouldn’t be that surprised. The Republicans have had a plan for years to strip away women’s rights to make choices over our own bodies. Just look at the recent facts.” — Sen. Elizabeth Warren responding to the latest tiresome Republican attempt to defund Planned Parenthood. 8/04/15

Roger Ailes just called. He is a great guy & assures me that “Trump” will be treated fairly on @FoxNews. His word is always good! Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump 8/10/15

“I think that if no one stands up to a bully, a bully will just keep doing what they’re doing. We’ve got an empty suit here, full of bravado but not full of anything really meaningful for the country.” — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) on Donald Trump. 8/10/15

“The Republican Party and Fox permitted and encouraged Trumpian vitriol for years. All that talk over the years about birth certificates and Kenya and terrorist fist-jabs (remember that one?!) and the moocher class and the scary brown people and all the rest of it…all of it created a need for a Trump, and for other Trump-like candidates, to flourish. Now it threatens to overtake them. If they’re wondering who created Trumpism, I have someplace they can look. The mirror. — Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast 8.11.15

1. The Borowitz Report: Trump Fails to Back Up Misogynist Slurs with Anti-woman Proposals, Rivals Say

Tempers flared in the aftermath of Thursday night’s Republican debate, as rival candidates accused the billionaire Donald Trump of failing to back up his misogynist slurs with concrete and workable anti-woman proposals.

Governor Walker piled on, touting his own anti-woman achievements during his time in office. “In Wisconsin, I used my power as governor to repeal a law supporting equal pay for women,” he said. “No offense to Mr. Trump, but nothing on his résumé compares with that.”

The attacks by Trump’s rivals seemed to sting the hotheaded billionaire, who hit back hard on Friday. “When it comes to coming up with solid anti-woman solutions, I do not intend to be lectured by Jeb Bush and Scott Walker,” he said, noting that the wall he intends to build on the border with Mexico would keep out many women. More at http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/

2. A debate without moderation

— Mike Huckabee suggested he would defy the Supreme Court in order to ban abortion, because it’s “not the Supreme Being.”

Fox News’ purpose in the main 10-candidate event was made plain with the first question: an in-your-face spotlight on Donald Trump’s refusal to promise not to run as an independent candidate. And the relentless pounding of Trump—on his bankruptcies, his past support for single-payer health care and abortion rights, his “specific evidence” for claiming Mexico has dispatched criminals to the U.S. (slurs about immigrants by other candidates didn’t come up) and even his sexist tweets-—continued right on through to Frank Luntz’s post-debate focus group, designed to show how much damage Trump had sustained. It was by far the least impartial showing by debate sponsors I have seen, up to and including the disgraceful ABC-moderated 2008 Democratic event that involved a deliberate trashing of all the candidates. 8/07/15 Read more at http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/fox-news-control-over-gop-debates

“I was appointed U.S. Attorney by President Bush on September 10th, 2001, and the world changed enormously the next day, and that happened in my state. This is not theoretical to me,” —Chris Christie in his closing remarks, repeating the claim and date.

VERSUS

Christie was not sworn in as a federal prosecutor until January 17, 2002, over 3 months after the attacks. — Marcy Wheeler,

“Barack Obama became president, and he abandoned Iraq. He left, and when he left Al Qaida was done for. ISIS was created because of the void that we left, and that void now exists as a caliphate the size of Indiana.” — Jeb Bush

VERSUS

The so-called Status of Forces of Agreement between the United States and the government of Iraq regarding the long term U.S. military presence was sealed not by the Obama administration but George W. Bush, the former Florida governor’s brother. It required U.S. combat forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009 and for all U.S. combat forces to leave the country by December 31, 2011. — Politico

“I governed as a conservative, and I govern effectively. And the net effect was, during my eight years, 1.3 million jobs were created. We left the state better off because I applied conservative principles in a purple state the right way, and people rose up.” — Jeb Bush

VERSUS

Home prices in the Sunshine State fell 47 percent from 2006 to 2009, the unemployment rate climbed from 3.5 percent in January 2007 to as high as 11.2 percent by the end of 2009. The Florida courts are still working through the fallout of the housing market’s collapse there. More than 105,000 foreclosures were completed in the 12 months ending in April, the most of any state.. — Politico

For what may be the first time in Donald Trump’s surprisingly successful campaign for president, his popularity has slipped. A national poll released by Rasmussen Reports on Tuesday found that Trump slipped 9 points from the same poll conducted in July. — The Hill 8/11/15

VERSUS

There is no sign that Donald Trump’s raucous first presidential debate is hurting his support among party voters, with the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll showing he still has a big lead over his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.” — Reuters 8/11/15

“A new study finds that Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move’ program may have caused people to actually gain weight. Many mistook the slogan to mean, let’s move next door to a Cinnabon.” –Conan O’Brien

“Over the weekend in Iran, temperatures reached 165 degrees, one of the highest temperatures ever recorded on earth. In fact, it was so hot in Iran, American flags burst into flames on their own.” –Jimmy Fallon

“Thursday night is the first Republican presidential candidates’ debate. Just like ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ you’ll see Donald Trump on TV yelling at people you barely recognize.” –Conan O’Brien

“Donald Trump’s phone number has been leaked. When you call Trump’s cellphone number it plays a campaign message. If you want to hear Trump’s message in English, press one. If you want to hear it in Spanish, you probably don’t follow the news.” –Conan O’Brien

“After Donald Trump gave out Lindsey Graham’s personal phone number a couple of weeks ago, the website Gawker gave out Trump’s personal cellphone number. Which backfired when Trump just speed-insulted everyone who called him: Loser. Moron. Idiot. Loser.” –Jimmy Fallon

“Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Rick Perry are currently fighting for the final two spots in Thursday’s Republican debate. It’s going to be tough – Chris Christie really wants those two spots.” –Jimmy Fallon

“It seems like everybody’s weighing in on Trumps campaign – even Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. He said that Trump is ‘probably the best thing to happen to politics in a long, long time.’ Then Trump was like, ‘Well, at least one Cuban loves me.'” –Jimmy Fallon

“Jeb Bush participated in his first Spanish-language interview with Telemundo this week, where he said he’s more optimistic than the other candidates. And you can tell he’s optimistic, cuz he thinks speaking in Spanish will help him with REPUBLICANS.” –Jimmy Fallon

“We’re in the middle of a heat wave here in New York City, and temperatures are supposed to be in the 90s for the next several days. In fact Donald Trump was so mad about the weather, he actually gave away Al Roker’s personal phone number.” –Jimmy Fallon

“Trump said if his presidential campaign fails, he will ‘ride into the sunset.’ And if Donald Trump WINS the presidency, Hillary says she’s gonna ride off a cliff like Thelma and Louise.” –Jimmy Fallon

— “Our country doesn’t need another Joe Lieberman in the Senate, and it certainly doesn’t need him as Democratic leader. The vast majority of Democratic voters — the people who elected President Obama in part because of our shared belief that war must always be a last resort — will not stand for it.” — MoveOn political action executive director Ilya Sheyman. 8/08/15

— “We’re going to get the Iran deal done with or without Sen. Schumer or anyone else who insists on being trapped in the past when it comes to conflict resolution in the Middle East. Senator Schumer was wrong when he voted to back the war with Iraq and he’s wrong to work with Republicans to kill this nuclear deal with Iran, period.” — Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America. 8/07/15

— “You can imagine a scenario where, let’s say Republicans win the presidency and Democrats are not only in the minority but there’s a Republican in the White House, and who will the Democratic Party want to lead them? The guy that said ObamaCare was a mistake? A guy that championed the first Iraq war? A guy that helped Republicans take us into, if successful, a new war of choice in the Middle East? That’s not going to be the guy the Democrats need to lead.” — Becky Bond, political director for Credo Action. 8/07/15

— He’s the senator from Wall Street, not Main Street. In 2002, he voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. In 2006, he supported George Bush’s nomination of John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, reportedly telling his fellow Democrats that “a vote against Bolton was a vote against Israel.” As leader, his job would be to unite Democrats, not divide them. Yet now, given a chance to stand with President Obama, he’s chosen to stand instead with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), with Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), with Netanyahu.” — Bill Press 8/10/15

Twelve years ago, in August 2003, Joe Lieberman led in most polls of the Democratic primary. Eight years ago, in August 2007, Rudy Giuliani maintained a clear lead in polls of Republicans, while Hillary Clinton led in polls of the Democratic nomination contest. Four years ago, in August 2011, Mitt Romney began with the lead in polls of Republican voters, but he would be surpassed by the end of the month by Rick Perry, the first of four Republican rivals who would at some point overtake Romney in national polling averages.

Lieberman, Clinton, Giuliani and Perry, as you’ve probably gathered, are not the faces atop Mount Rushmore. Only Clinton came close to winning the nomination.

MYTH: Clinton Received Emails Marked As “Top Secret”FACT: None Of The Emails Sent To Clinton Were Labeled As “Classified” Or “Top Secret”

MYTH: Emails Weren’t Marked As “Classified” Because Clinton Used A Private Server Instead Of State Dept. EmailFACT: Emails Originated In State Dept. System, And Questions About Retroactive Classification Would Have Occurred Regardless Of Clinton’s Server Use

MYTH: Hillary Clinton’s Email Use Is Comparable To David Petraeus’ CrimesFACT: Experts Have Debunked The Comparison — Petraeus Knowingly Mishandled Classified Documents, Whereas Clinton Had Authorization To Use Private Email, And There’s No Evidence She Knowingly Emailed Classified Information

MYTH: Clinton Is The Subject Of A Federal Criminal InvestigationFACT: IG Referral To Justice Department Was Not Criminal, And FBI Isn’t Targeting Clinton Herself

This was, according to many commentators, going to be the election cycle Republicans got to show off their “deep bench.” The race for the nomination would include experienced governors like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, fresh thinkers like Rand Paul, and attractive new players like Marco Rubio. Instead, however, Donald Trump leads the field by a wide margin. What happened?

The answer, according to many of those who didn’t see it coming, is gullibility: People can’t tell the difference between someone who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about and someone who is actually serious about the issues. And for sure there’s a lot of gullibility out there. But if you ask me, the pundits have been at least as gullible as the public, and still are.

For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.

Until now, however, leading Republicans have generally tried to preserve a facade of respectability, helping the news media to maintain the pretense that it was dealing with a normal political party. What distinguishes Mr. Trump is not so much his positions as it is his lack of interest in maintaining appearances. And it turns out that the party’s base, which demands extremist positions, also prefers those positions delivered straight. Why is anyone surprised?

Can Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement. 8/07/15 Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/opinion/paul-krugman-from-trump-on-down-the-republicans-cant-be-serious.html

2. Eugene Robinson: Do-Nothing Republicans on Climate Change

The vast majority of scientists who have devoted their professional lives to studying the Earth’s climate believe human-induced warming is an urgent problem requiring bold action. Republican candidates for president insist they know better.

With one possible exception — Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who barely registers in the polls — GOP contenders either doubt the scientific consensus on climate change or oppose attempts to do anything about it. This promises to be one of the starkest ideological divides facing voters next year.

No pressure; it’s only the fate of the planet hanging in the balance.

Before President Obama could even announce his administration’s tough new curbs on carbon emissions from power plants, Republican hopefuls launched pre-emptive attacks. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who flat-out denies that climate change is taking place, accused scientists of “cooking the books” and Democrats of choosing “California environmentalist billionaires and their campaign donations” over “the jobs of union members.” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida charged that the new rules “will make the cost of electricity high for millions of Americans.” Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush called the regulations “unconstitutional” and claimed they would cost jobs.

These comments came at Sunday’s Freedom Partners forum, organized by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch to give GOP candidates a chance to strut their stuff. In that setting, I suppose, reality-based rhetoric would be too much to hope for.

Half a century after President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation creating Medicare and Medicaid with a pledge that seniors no longer would “be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine,” the promise has been largely fulfilled.

The two entitlements – one for the elderly and one for low-income Americans – have kept generations of seniors in their homes and extended life-saving insurance protections to poor children and families. The share of uninsured seniors, which was 48% in 1962, is now less than 2%.

Yet, the two programs today look far different than they did in 1965, as Democrats and Republicans have each expanded and reshaped them over the last five decades.

The evolution has been at times contentious, and often unexpected, with GOP presidents presiding over some of the biggest expansions of the government healthcare plans.

That history may offer clues about what lies ahead for the sweeping health law that President Obama enacted in 2010.

Since the ’80s, the federal government has used its power as the largest single payer for healthcare to drive medical providers around the country to improve quality and efficiency.

“We’ve had Republican presidents expanding benefits and imposing cost controls,” said University of North Carolina political scientist Jonathan Oberlander, a Medicare authority. “The politics of Medicare aren’t entirely predictable.”

Whether the Affordable Care Act will follow a similar trajectory remains unclear.

Unlike Medicare and Medicaid, which were ultimately backed by Republicans and implemented with relatively little controversy, the 2010 law remains deeply polarizing, even five years after its enactment.

But around the country, there are some signs that GOP officials are quietly making accommodations, and even putting a conservative stamp on elements of the law, such as the Medicaid expansion.

On Sunday morning, President Obama released a video “memo to America.” It pointed to droughts, super-storms and increases in asthma as evidence that climate change is not just a problem for future generations, but our own.

If you live, work or breathe in the United States, Obama’s new national Clean Power Plan is good news for you. Unfortunately, you would never know that — if you listened to all the big polluters screaming bloody murder about it.

The clean power plan is a smart approach — because it is both powerful and flexible. It requires that U.S. power plants reduce their emissions 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. But each state gets to decide how best to do that. They can invest in renewables like solar and wind, switch to natural gas, or simply upgrade coal plants to produce more electricity with lower emissions.

This is smart federal policy-making. President Obama is setting a clear goal, but he is leaving it to the laboratories of democracy to decide how best to get there.

Of course, that fact will not stop the bellyaching from fossil fuel companies and their puppet politicians. Big polluters are already pulling out all the stops, trying to convince you that this plan will somehow doom the republic.

5. David Shorr: We Need Real Options For An Iran Deal, Not Unicorn Fantasies

What do unicorns and a perfect agreement to constrain Iran’s nuclear activities have in common? The question is rhetorical of course, but it makes a serious point about the deal recently reached by Iran, the U.S., and six other key international players, and is currently being debated in Congress.

By any reasonable standard, the deal places stringent limits on the Iranian nuclear program and subjects it to highly intrusive verification—under penalty of re-imposed sanctions if Iran fails to comply. But that hasn’t stopped critics from judging the agreement by unreasonable unicorn-like standards and the fantasy of walking Iran back to the tiny program it had ten years ago.

An honest and healthy policy debate focuses on realistic options, not unicorn fantasies. Iran will not offer a better deal. The rest of the world will not go along with continued sanctions if we reject this deal. Even the advocates of military strikes admit Iran could rebuild its nuclear capabilities within just several years after being attacked. So if a war would bring us back to square one after just three to five years, how is that preferable to limits set for 15 years?

Some critics of the agreement simply don’t want to deal with Iran at all. They’re correct that the agreement won’t stop Iran’s leaders from oppressing their own people or sewing instability in the region. There are two big problems with this position. First, Iran’s leading dissidents are on-record supporting the nuclear deal. And second, anyone arguing this case and rejecting the deal cannot then complain about the special dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran. The deal does not solve all problems with Iran, but it does an excellent job with most urgent one. 8/03/15 Read more at http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/iran-nuclear-deal-unicorn-fantasies

6. Matt Taibbi: Republican Assault on Trump May Only Make Him Stronger

The main argument of all of Trump’s conservative critics seems to be, “He’s not a real Republican! He’ll destroy the party establishment!” The people making these criticisms seem to assume that conservative voters will see this as a bad thing.

But there are plenty of Tea Party-type voters out there who hate the Republican Party establishment almost as much as they hate the Democrats. There are also plenty of right-wing voters who think George Will and Charles Krauthammer are smug media weasels only slightly less disgusting than the Rachel Maddows and Keith Olbermanns of the world. A know-it-all is a know-it-all.

Trump’s followers are a gang of pissed-off nativists who are tired of being laughed at, belittled, dismissed, and told who to vote for. So it seems incredible that the Republican establishment thinks it’s going to get rid of Trump by laughing at, belittling and dismissing him, and telling his voters who they should be picking.

These hysterical critics are making one of the world’s most irredeemable bullies look persecuted and like a victim, a difficult feat. The desperation to get rid of him may just feed more and more into the right wing base’s crazy victim complex, and in turn get Trump even more support.

The Republican party and its allies at Fox, on afternoon radio and in the blogosphere have spent many years whipping audiences into zombie-style bloodlusts. When it suited them, party insiders told voters across middle America that foreigners were trying to crawl through their windows to take their wives, and that stuffed suits in Washington and in the media were conspiring to enslave their children in Marxist bondage.

7. Tom Blanton: America classifies way too much information — and we are all less safe for it

The inspectors general of the State Department and the intelligence community have made a security referral to the Justice Department regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails on the grounds that some of them were “potentially classified.”

So is this column.

Watch out: Your clearance is at stake.

Here at the National Security Archive, in our “Dubious Secrets” series, we have published hundreds of U.S. government documents that one office or official considers declassified, while another insists must stay secret. Whom do you listen to?

But let’s talk about Clinton. Thank goodness she used a private email server when she was secretary of state. If she had used the State Department system, practically none of her email would survive. That’s how bad State’s electronic archiving was then. Instead, the State Department has 30,000 of her messages, and history is becoming much the wiser. Her critics, not so much.

Now, the same folks who clamored to see those messages seem to want to lock them up in classified vaults. Foolishness. They intend to redact the emails, thus putting red flags right on messages that circulated for years in unclassified form, thus highlighting the secrets they contain, if there really are any. Keeping the emails unclassified would actually be the best way to protect anything sensitive – through obscurity.

There were significant efficiency gains for our national security when the secretary of state ran her main email account in unclassified form. No artificial barriers to information sharing. A bright line against including truly classified documents. A standing rebuke to the massive overclassification all around her.

I’ve seen a couple-million pages of documents that were classified when the government put them on paper or computer screens. I can say from experience that few deserved such consideration.

The best defense of an open society is open information. We are not safer in the dark.

I used to chuckle when people claimed that voters make decisions based upon how much they like a candidate and not on a candidate’s policies. But after last night’s debate, I’m starting to think that the GOP candidates must believe that policies don’t matter much to voters at all.

However, if people actually do vote based upon policies, you only need to look at public opinion polls to realize how destructive these positions will be with the general electorate.

The debate took place on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, yet not a single candidate expressed support for the freedom to vote. Candidates in the first debate did not utter the words “middle class” even once. The words were uttered only twice in the prime time debate. You’d think with all of those candidates, one could afford to spare a moment for issues that are so important to so many Americans. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.

In 2008 and 2012, the Republican Party lost presidential elections because its candidates hitched their campaigns to an unpopular, out-of-touch and out-of-date agenda. This time around, some Democrats privately worried that, perhaps, they had finally learned their lesson and would moderate positions.

What did the men who would be president talk about during last week’s prime-time Republican debate? Well, there were 19 references to God, while the economy rated only 10 mentions. Republicans in Congress have voted dozens of times to repeal all or part of Obamacare, but the candidates only named President Obama’s signature policy nine times over the course of two hours. And energy, another erstwhile G.O.P. favorite, came up only four times.

Strange, isn’t it? The shared premise of everyone on the Republican side is that the Obama years have been a time of policy disaster on every front. Yet the candidates on that stage had almost nothing to say about any of the supposed disaster areas.

Several days ago, perennial presidential candidate Mike Huckabee charged that President Obama was ready to lead Israeli Jews “to the ovens.” A few days later, he said he might use not only the FBI but even the US military to prevent abortions. And around the same time, Ted Cruz called Obama the world’s biggest funder of Islamic terrorism. There was a day when cracks like these would have stopped the political world in its tracks, spurring transgressive glee from supporters and outrage from liberals and normal people. But this summer, they’ve struggled to break through. And the reason is obvious: Donald Trump has flooded the market with a new, purer brand of Crazy that has left the other candidates scrambling and basically unable to compete.

Trump is now in the lead in virtually every national poll of the Republican primary race. It’s easy to overstate what that means since, in such a populous field, he can do that handily with something like a mere 20% support. But it’s worth stepping back to see how we got here. Because Trump is in many ways the logical end result of seven years – really two-plus decades – of Republican cultivation of anger and grievance as a method of conducting politics.This is what brought us the 2010 and 2014 election triumphs on the one hand, but also government shut-downs, debt crises based on nothing, and more.

That novelty and lack of normal political constraints is what is allowing him to run circles around his competitors who had hoped to play in the Crazy space. Showmanship, lack of touch with reality, and a palpable handle on the grievance and unrestrained self-assertion that is at the center of modern Republican base politics have made Trump, for now, almost impossible to outdo in a crowded field. 8/10/15 Read more at http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-declining-marginal-value-of-crazy

11. Matt Taibbi: Inside the GOP Clown Car

On the campaign trail in Iowa, Donald Trump’s antics have forced the other candidates to get crazy or go home

Politics used to be a simple, predictable con. Every four years, the money men in D.C. teamed up with party hacks to throw their weight behind whatever half-bright fraud of a candidate proved most adept at snowing the population into buying a warmed-over version of the same crappy policies they’ve always bought.

Pundits always complained that there wasn’t enough talk about issues during these races, but in reality, issues were still everything. Behind the scenes, where donors gave millions for concrete favors, there was always still plenty of policy. And skilled political pitchmen like Christie, who could deftly deliver on those back-room promises to crush labor and hand out transportation contracts or whatever while still acting like a man of the people, were highly valued commodities. pagebreak

Not anymore. Trump has blown up even the backroom version of the issues-driven campaign. There are no secret donors that we know of. Trump himself appears to be the largest financial backer of the Trump campaign. A financial report disclosed that Trump lent his own campaign $1.8 million while raising just $100,000.

There’s no hidden platform behind the shallow facade. With Trump, the facade is the whole deal. If old-school policy hucksters like Christie can’t find a way to beat a media master like Trump at the ratings game, they will soon die out.

In a perverse way, Trump has restored a more pure democracy to this process. He’s taken the Beltway thinkfluencers out of the game and turned the presidency into a pure high-school-style popularity contest conducted entirely in the media. Everything we do is a consumer choice now, from picking our shoes to an online streaming platform to a presidential nominee.

The irony, of course, is that when America finally wrested control of the political process from the backroom oligarchs, the very first place where we spent our newfound freedom and power was on the campaign of the world’s most unapologetic asshole. It may not seem funny now, because it’s happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.

Roe v Wade wasn’t overruled in the 1992 US supreme court case Planned Parenthood v Casey, but the justices did give states the power to regulate and restrict the procedure. In the years since, many states did make abortion much harder to obtain without officially outlawing it. But the pro-life movement means to push until restrictions turn into bans. And as the electoral primaries heat up, it’s becoming clear that that radicalism has moved into the mainstream in the Republican Party.

The latest anti-choice move: try to take custody of a woman’s fetus

Followers of policy at the state level could see all this coming. Opponents of reproductive freedom, especially in the reddest states, are no longer satisfied with merely making abortion less accessible (especially for poor and rural women). They want it all. And those awful ideas from the state level are floating to the top. Some of the frontrunner Republicans are explicit about wanting women to have even fewer reproductive rights than 19th-century American women did.

American women, then, face a stark choice. Two of the frontrunners would seek to extinguish a woman’s right to choose entirely. If Scott Walker had his way, women who get pregnant would potentially face a state-imposed death sentence. Given that the next president could be in a position to replace Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer – two of the members of the razor-thin five-vote majority supporting Roe v Wade – Americans who don’t want to return women to the reproductive dark ages should vote accordingly come November. 8/10/15 Read more at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/10/anti-abortion-hysteria-republican-candidates

13. David Denby: The Three Faces of Trump

People are constantly surprised and shocked by Trump because he doesn’t play by any known set of political rules. Even the three formidable Fox moderators (including Chris Wallace) were limited in their understanding of him by what they expected of political candidates—acknowledgment of some minimal level of consistency, plausibility, and accountability. They thought they could trip him up, even trap him, Tim Russert-style, in his contradictions and political changes. But he answered them with gibberish—silly jokes, non sequiturs, and irrelevant assertions. It’s impossible for Trump to contradict himself, since, as many have said, he has no beliefs, in the sense of ideological beliefs.

He exploited the country’s bankruptcy laws when his hotel-casino investments in Atlantic City went sour, and anyway, he got out early and made a lot of money. Got it? He made money. A single-payer system, often known as socialized medicine, “works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland. It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you’re talking about here.” (i.e., fifteen years ago). Got it? It works. But the Affordable Care Act, which could be seen as a hesitant first step toward a single-payer system, “is a disaster.” You can’t argue with reasoning like this because it always circles back to Trump’s triumphs over the naïve. He’s gone past contradiction, beyond tautology, into infallibility. In advance of the debate, he stopped studying policy papers. He doesn’t need answers; his temperament is the answer. My guess is that he will persist as long as he’s having fun, not spending much of his own money, and enjoying high poll numbers. Which could be right into the primaries next winter. The Republican Party and the media can’t begin to understand him until they look at his face. 10/12/15 Read more at http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-three-faces-of-trump

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION

DIRECT is a FREE web based weekly eZine. On most Thursday mornings subscribers are sent an email notice with the table of contents and link to the current issue.

ToSUBSCRIBE: Email jellison@san.rr.com with “subscribe” on the subject line. NOTE: Your email address will not be shared – ever!

This site contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use,’ you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. “Go to Original” links are provided as a convenience to allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “Go to Original” links.

“And that’s why I think it is essential that we all stand up and say loudly and clearly, ‘Yes, black lives matter.’ And we all have a responsibility to face these hard truths of race and justice honestly and directly,” —Hillary Clinton calling Sandra Bland’s “heartbreaking” death in a Texas jail cell “another African-American life cut short.” 7/23/15

The New York Times truly has become an embarrassment to American Journalism. Second anti HRC story in three months THEY GOT WRONG! — Howard Dean 7/24/15

“As I noted this afternoon, a lot of this has a disturbing similarity to the Times Whitewater coverage, which dominated much of the Clinton presidency and turned out to be more either vastly over-hyped or in numerous cases simply false. And this is the Times! What’s supposedly to be the best paper in the country.” — Josh Marshall7/24/15

““This past term, the court crossed a line, continued its long descent into lawlessness to a level I believe demands action. … When we have five unelected judges who are declaring for themselves they can decide every contested policy issue in our society, it is incumbent on elected representatives to take that authority.” — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 7/23/15

“We now know that when the majority leader looks us in the eyes and makes an explicit commitment that he is willing to say thing that he knows are false. That has consequences for how this body operates. If you or I cannot trust what the majority leader tells us, that will have consequences on other legislation, as well as on how this institution operates.” — Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) accusing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) of lying to him over a deal to vote on reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank. 7/24/15

“I’m just chugging along. You know, maybe people will get tired of me. Who knows? This press is crazy.” —Donald Trump, 7//23/15

“Wisconsin is doing terribly. It’s in turmoil. The roads are a disaster because they don’t have money to rebuild them. Schools are a disaster. Hospitals and education are a disaster. And he was totally in favor of Common Core, which I hate.” —Donald Trump, attacking Gov. Scott Walker in Iowa. 7/25/15

“First, let me say that I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time it was sent and received.” — Hillary Clinton, brushing off a new investigation into whether she sent or received classified information on her personal email address while at the State Department. 7/25/15

“He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued. … Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded. … We must move past the empty calories of Trumpism, and return to conservatism.” — Rick Perry’ at the Opportunity and Freedom PAC forum. 7/22/15 http://www.vox.com/2015/7/22/9016901/donald-trump-rick-perry

“If you’re getting high in Colorado today, enjoy it. As of January 2017, I will enforce the federal laws.” —Gov. Chris Christie (R) suggesting that residents of states where marijuana is legal smoke up before the next presidential inauguration, 7/29/15

1. The DAILY GRILL

“Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday. The request follows an assessment in a June 29 memo by the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies that Mrs. Clinton’s private account contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.” — The New York Times 7/24/15

VERSUS

“This is the latest example in a series of inaccurate leaks to generate false front-page headlines − only to be corrected later − and they have absolutely nothing to do with the attacks in Benghazi or protecting our diplomatic corps overseas.” — Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) rebutting reports that the State Department has formally requested a federal criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of State. 7/24/15

“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven. “ — Governor Huckabee who, according to Breitbart News, has demonstrated his keen ability to articulate conservative principles and values. 7/25/15

VERSUS

“The particular comments of Mr. Huckabee are I think part of just a general pattern we’ve seen… that would be considered ridiculous if it weren’t so sad. Maybe this is just an effort to push Mr. Trump out of the headlines but it’s not the kind of leadership that’s needed for America right now.” — President Obama responding to Mike Huckabee’s inflammatory comments on the Iran deal. 7/27/15

2. GOP Favorability Nosedives

The Republican Party’s image has grown more negative over the first half of this year. Currently, 32% have a favorable impression of the Republican Party, while 60% have an unfavorable view. Favorable views of the GOP have fallen nine percentage points since January. The Democratic Party continues to have mixed ratings (48% favorable, 47% unfavorable). 7/23/15 Read more at http://www.people-press.org/2015/07/23/gops-favorability-rating-takes-a-negative-turn/

3. Medicare still on stable footing because of Obamacare

The Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund will have sufficient funds to cover its obligations until 2030, the same year that was projected last year, and 13 years later than was projected in the last report issued prior to passage of the Affordable Care Act. 7/22/15 Read more at http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/jl0127.aspx

4. DNC’s GOP Debate Watch Party Pack

Be ready for the August 6th GOP debate is — order your GOP Debate Watch Party Pack and you’ll receive:

– Four (4) “I survived the GOP Debates” 16 oz plastic cups
– Four (4) “I survived the GOP Debates” lapel stickers (please only wear these if you do survive!)
– One 50-sheet bingo pad to play our official GOP Debate Bingo game with your friends.

In our hyper-partisan world, many people will not care about the truth here. That the Times story is false in almost every particular—down to the level of who wrote what memo—will only lead to accusations that people trying to set the record straight are pro-Hillary. I am not pro-Hillary. I am, however, pro-journalism. And this display of incompetence or malice cannot stand without correction.

And to other reporters: Democracy is not a game. It is not a means of getting our names on the front page or setting the world abuzz about our latest scoop. It is about providing information so that an electorate can make decisions based on reality. It is about being fair and being accurate. This despicable Times story was neither.– Kurt Eichenwald in Newsweek 7/24/15 Read more athttp://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-new-york-times-emails-357246

“Ohio Governor John Kasich became the 16th Republican to announce that he is running for president. During his speech he referred to Jesus Christ, which is ironic because so did Americans when they heard another Republican was running for president.” –Jimmy Fallon

“”Donald Trump’s children released a statement this week calling their father a ‘true visionary and a great mentor.’ And Trump released a statement calling his kids ‘suck-ups’ and ‘not the best.'” –Seth Meyers

“In a speech in South Carolina, Donald Trump responded to criticisms from Senator Lindsey Graham by giving out Graham’s personal cellphone number. Graham knew something was up when he saw he had more than one missed call.” –Jimmy Fallon

“In a new campaign ad, Jeb Bush referenced ‘The Godfather’ and said his nickname used to be ‘Veto Corleone’ because he vetoed so many bills in Florida. When you’re the third person in your family to run for president, maybe you shouldn’t bring up a movie trilogy where the third one was clearly the worst.” –Jimmy Fallon

“At a campaign event in South Carolina, Trump gave out Senator Lindsey Graham’s personal cellphone number. He’s bringing the same level of class to this presidential election that one does to a stall in a public restroom.” –Jimmy Kimmel

“At a campaign event today, Donald Trump read Senator Lindsey Graham’s cellphone number aloud on live TV. It’s the craziest thing Trump has done since whatever he did right before that.” –Seth Meyers

“Donald Trump got in some trouble for saying that John McCain is not a war hero, and said, ‘I like people that weren’t captured.’ Not good. In fact, Trump’s people are telling him to lay low for a while until this all combs over.” –Jimmy Fallon

“Rick Perry said Donald Trump is unfit to be president and called for him to immediately withdraw from the race. Then he said, ‘And that’s coming from ME!'” –Jimmy Fallon

“Perry actually said Trump is a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense who is unfit to be president. Then Perry took off his glasses and said, ‘Whoa! I think these things are magic!'” –Jimmy Fallon

“Donald Trump’s campaign has raised about $100,000 in donations during the second quarter. Which raises an important question: Who is giving Donald Trump money? That’s like giving your money to a pile of money.” –Jimmy Fallon

“In a recent interview, John McCain addressed Trump’s campaign rally in Arizona and said that he just quote, ‘fired up the crazies.’ Not to be confused with Trump’s show ‘Celebrity Apprentice,’ where he just FIRED the crazies.” –Jimmy Fallon

“MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell is saying Donald Trump lied when he said he made $20 million a year off his ‘Apprentice’ series on NBC. NBC also denied Trump’s claim, saying, ‘We don’t have $20 million. We’re NBC.'” –Jimmy Fallon

“Researchers here in New York created a robot that actually passed a self-awareness test. So if you’re keeping score, that’s robots: 1, Donald Trump, 0.” –Jimmy Fallon

“President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison yesterday. Obama said it was a good chance to talk about prison reform, and to catch up with so many former congressmen.” –Jimmy Fallon

“Over on the Democratic side, Martin O’Malley recently spoke about the need for Wall Street reform and said that he isn’t running for president to be quote, ‘wined and dined’ by executives. Then Chris Christie said, ‘And I am also not running to be wined.'” –Jimmy Fallon

“In a new poll of Democratic voters, presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee came in with zero percent support. Or in other words: We’re all tied with presidential candidate Lincoln Chafee.” –Jimmy Fallon

“In an interview, Hillary Clinton said she likes nearly every flavor of ice cream. When he heard this, Chris Christie said ‘Hey, she stole my speech.'” –Conan O’Brien

10. Texas Denies Birth Certificates to Immigrant Children

Texas health officials are asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit by immigrant parents who were denied birth certificates for their U.S.-born children because local authorities refused to recognize as valid certain forms of identification.

Lawyers representing 19 immigrant parents and their 23 children filed suit against the Texas Department of State Health Services after officials refused to issue birth certificates for their U.S.-born children, citing invalid forms of identification. The parents came from Mexico and Central America and living in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, along the U.S.-Mexico border.

13. The Borowitz Report: In Bid to Take Attention from Trump, Other 15 Hopefuls Release Joint Sex Tape

In what critics are calling a desperate attempt to draw the media’s attention away from Donald Trump, the other fifteen candidates for the Republican nomination have released a joint sex tape.

The tape, including such luminaries as former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Texas senator Ted Cruz, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and New Jersey governor Chris Christie, appeared briefly on major news Web sites before an avalanche of viewer revulsion demanded it be taken down.

According to Carol Foyler, a viewer who happened to catch the tape during its brief appearance on the CNN Web site, the video contained images “I may never be able to get out of my mind.”

“I couldn’t believe that these people would participate in such a thing,” she said. “Except maybe Santorum.”
A spokesman for Rick Perry defended the former Texas governor’s appearance on the tape. “It changed the conversation, at least for a minute or two,” the spokesman said.

Possibly as a result of his exclusion from the sex tape, in the aftermath of its release Trump has surged another eleven points in the latest poll.

EARLIER: Presidential candidate Donald Trump revealed a little-known episode of personal heroism from his youth on Saturday, telling an Iowa audience that he narrowly avoided capture in Vietnam by remaining in the United States for the duration of the war.

Two low-profile Texas brothers, billionaires Farris and Dan Wilks, have donated $15 million to support Sen. Ted Cruz, a record-setting contribution that amounts to the largest known donation so far in the 2016 presidential campaign. 7/25/15 Read more at http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/25/politics/ted-cruz-wilks-brothers/

15. New poll finds strong support for Iran nuclear deal

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds that there’s strong support nationally for the Iran deal, that voters want their members of Congress to let it move forward, and that there’s no potential political backlash for members who do support the deal. 7/27/15 Read more at http://aufc.3cdn.net/e6dca770dc6d71f7d2_tgm6bxklu.pdf

Note: ALA Jewish Journall survey finds that 48% of Jewish Americans support the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration while 28% oppose it and 25% hadn’t heard enough to form an opinion.

The media, you may have noticed, is full of Trump—explanations of Trump, denunciations of Trump, justifications of Trump, analyses of Trump, handwringing about the coverage of Trump, and accounts of the latest outrageous thing Trump has done. He is on the front page of every newspaper, the top of every newscast. They can’t believe it; they can’t get their heads around it, that this is happening, and not only is it happening, it is the biggest thing in American politics right now. It has consumed American politics. It—Trump—is bigger than the entire rest of the Republican field, which, by the way, has 15 other people in it—governors, senators, very big, very serious people. Trump is bigger than them all.

Trump is so big they are attacking him just to get themselves noticed. Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, called Trump a “jackass,” so Trump gave out his cell-phone number on national television, and suddenly Lindsey Graham, languishing at less than 1 percent in the polls, was all anybody was talking about. You’re welcome, Lindsey Graham.

Trump has the Republican Party by the throat. It cannot figure out how to get rid of him. The party elites, those snobs in D.C. who do not respect or understand the people out there in America, are tearing their hair out over the damage Trump is supposedly doing to the party. “He is, I believe, causing some problems,” Randy Blair, the county Republican chairman, a polite, mustached accountant in a gray-tweed suit, tells me as we ride on Trump’s bus.

Yet the party has no power over Trump. He has the money, he has the press, he has the voters. If he does not feel the GOP is treating him fairly, he is considering running as an independent instead. In that case, polls indicate he would take a chunk of votes from the Republican candidate, and Hillary Clinton would win by a large margin.

So the party has to be nice to him; it has to let him on the stage. The 20 percent of the party that loves Trump may be dumb or racist or angry or wrong, but the Republican Party cannot live without them. The GOP is damned if Trump stays and damned if he goes, and no one knows how the show will end.

2. Frank Rich/Alex Carp: The GOP Only Has Itself to Blame for Weaponizing Donald Trump

For all the other much-discussed factors contributing to the Trump boom — the power of celebrity, his “anti-politician” vibe, his freak-show outrageousness, his Don Rickles–style putdowns — it is the substantive issue of immigration that remains the core of his appeal to his fans. That’s why Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are defending him; it’s why Bill Kristol did until last weekend. And those Republicans who are now demanding that he desist are mostly hypocrites. John McCain himself, after all, enabled and legitimized those Trump partisans he now dismisses as “crazies” by putting Sarah Palin on the ticket in 2008. Other GOP leaders waited too long to disown the conspiracy theories about the president’s birth certificate that Trump would eventually exploit to reboot his political aspirations. Romney ostentatiously courted and received Trump’s endorsement in 2012. Many of the Republican politicians now condemning Trump for attacking McCain’s heroism in Vietnam were silent (or worse) when John Kerry’s Vietnam heroism was Swift Boated in 2004.

The GOP can blame the media all it wants, but the party has no one to blame but itself for weaponizing Trump. It subsidized and encouraged the market for what Trump is now selling. Now the Republicans’ only really hope is that Trump will blow himself up, Herman Cain style. Maybe he will, and he certainly has no chance of getting the nomination no matter what he does. But in the meantime he can keep wreaking havoc. Nine other GOP candidates were onstage at the Ames, Iowa, forum last weekend where he trashed McCain, and no one remembers anything anyone else there said unless it was in response to Trump. The same may well happen at the first national debate on Fox News on August 6, which is likely (because of Trump, and much to his delight) to be the highest rated primary debate in history.

Even over the short term, the Republicans are clueless about how to deal with him; they keep playing into his hands. A classic example was yesterday, when John Kasich, regarded by some Republicans I know as perhaps the most substantive and qualified prospect the party has, announced his presidential candidacy. His announcement was drowned out not just by Trump, with his stunt of revealing Lindsey Graham’s private cell-phone number at a campaign event, but by Graham himself, who took the bait by taking to Twitter and television to joke about it — thereby making certain even a minor Trump stunt would keep depriving the rest of the GOP field of oxygen. Read more at http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/07/gop-only-has-itself-to-blame-for-trump.html

3. Brenday Gilfillan: The Disturbing Subtext Of The GOP Opposition To The Iran Deal

Diplomacy—specifically, diplomacy with Iran—has always had its adversaries. Ever since the country was declared part of the Axis of Evil, the bottom line for a vocal minority of folks has been that Iran is simply too evil to deal with. And to be sure, these opponents have a solid point; Iran’s behavior at home and abroad is the primary obstacle to its inclusion in the international community. At the end of the day, pretending adversaries don’t exist isn’t how a responsible superpower engages with the world—just as we stared down the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, so we chose to do with a belligerent Iranian regime.

Opponents of negotiation—those who have been trying to derail the talks since they began—aren’t acknowledging these incredible victories, but that’s hardly surprising given their peculiar behavior throughout the process. On March 9, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) led 47 other U.S. Senators in sending a letter addressed to the leadership in Iran condescendingly “explaining” America’s constitutional system and promising to undermine any deal struck with the current American administration.

While that might have been the most outrageous stunt, the rhetoric has been equally absurd. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) compared chief negotiator Wendy Sherman to Neville Chamberlain in an ill-advised historical analogy. And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) rushed to CNN yesterday morning to denounce the agreement “as a bad deal, the worst possible outcome”…before admitting he hadn’t read it. Would they have stood in the Senate and decried President Reagan’s arms control agreements and written a letter to Gorbachev?

When I opened my favorite news aggregator this morning, nine of the top ten items were about Donald Trump. That’s right: 90% of the top stories involved the bloviating real estate tycoon and reality TV star.

No, I’m not going to write 90% of my 12 posts today on The Donald, but as someone whose job is at least partially to inform readers of what others are talking about, I can’t ignore him, either.

Still, whereas the big question at the beginning of the week was whether Trump’s suddenly high standing in early horse-race polls of the Republican nomination contest could survive his criticism of John McCain’s war record, now we have to wonder how long he can succeed in blotting out the sky with “controversial remarks” that feed his publicity machine.

Unless fresh polls show his support collapsing, or he suddenly attacks Jesus Christ or U.S. troops in the field, it’s probably inevitable that Trump-o-mania will last at least until the August 6 GOP presidential debate, where the debate within the debate will be about Trump’s interaction with other candidates and his relative ability to overshadow the proceedings. Beyond that, his perpetual trump card—yeah, pun intended—is going to be his ability at any moment to strike terror into the heart of Republicans by hinting at an independent candidacy that could threaten the soft white working class underbelly of the GOP base.

The prospect of a very close, high-stakes major-party race for the presidency means that a Trump indie run could become a serious factor even if he loses much of his current support. We could go through two or three or eight boom and bust cycles of “Trump mania” and “Trump fatigue” without getting rid of him. So get used to it. 7/23/15 Read more at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_07/trump_card056723.php

5. Steve Benen: Jeb Bush pushes to ‘phase out’ Medicare

Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush appeared at a New Hampshire event last night sponsored by the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, and the former governor raised a few eyebrows with his comments on the future of Medicare.

Remember, Jeb Bush is the ostensible moderate candidate in the massive GOP presidential field. It says something important about Republican politics in 2015 when the most mainstream candidate is also the candidate who wants to scrap Medicare altogether.

\The Florida Republican is convinced that “people understand” the need to get rid of Medicare. He’s mistaken. Given the polling from the last several years, what people understand is that Medicare is a popular and successful program, and a pillar of modern American life.

Previous attempts to “phase out” the program have met with widespread public scorn and if Jeb Bush believes he can “persuade people” to get rid of Medicare, he’s likely to be disappointed.

Before “Obamacare” was passed, Medicare was projected to face a serious fiscal shortfall in 2017. As of yesterday, Medicare trustees now believe the system is fiscally secure through 2030.

As silly as Donald Trump’s presidential bid has proven thus far, and as indefensible as some of his recent remarks have been, there is a sanctimonious tone to the criticism leveled at both that would be far less grating if it weren’t so hypocritical.

Trump may rightly be accused of bigotry, but he’s no worse than, say, homophobia’s grand slam champ Rick Santorum, who has compared gay sex to bestiality. And genuine or not, the GOP has never had a problem playing on its core base’s prejudices to win political office. So while RNC Chairman Reince Priebus may have reportedly asked Trump to “tone down” his controversial remarks about immigration—you know, referring to Mexicans as “rapists”—this is the same party that demonizes immigrants regularly. Look at Arizona’s fervent (and eventually unsuccessful) attempts at racial profiling. Look at Iowa GOP congressman Steve King, who has compared immigrants to dogs.

Or look at the wave of “birtherism” that the likes of Trump and many, many Republicans across the country aimed at President Obama for years. There was no widespread condemnation by GOP leaders. Asking Trump to “tone down” his language won’t alter the reality that the GOP is not a friend to immigrants. Or blacks. Or women. Or gays. Or trans men and women. Or the poor.

Tellingly, the only hard line the GOP has taken is in response to Trump’s comments about Senator John McCain. RNC chief strategist and communications director, Sean Spicer, said, “Senator McCain is an American hero because he served his country and sacrificed more than most can imagine. Period. There is no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably.”

McCain may have taken issue with the swift-boating of then Democratic presidential contender, John Kerry, in 2004, but the national party sure didn’t.

I was initially annoyed with the attention lavished on Trump’s run for the presidency, but now I realize it’s a valuable opportunity to illustrate how Trump is a monster Republicans helped create. He is nothing more than a louder, shameless example of what the GOP has become. Let’s not pretend he’s a Republican outlier; he’s their id. 7/23/15 Read more at http://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/donald-trump-monster-gop-helped-create

7. Chattanooga Times Free Press: When will the shooting stop?

We have the same conversation about guns and public safety after every mass shooting in this country.

Each time, the conversation also gets hijacked — muddled with incorrect perceptions that anyone talking about gun standards must be talking about taking our guns away. We must get past the red herrings in this and begin to talk long enough to make this distinction: Guns in the woods and fields of our hunting lands are very different from guns in our neighborhoods, in our parks, in our strip centers, theaters, restaurants, bars, offices — even churches. Secondly, we must recognize that standards for legal gun ownership should correlate with the risk an owner or would-be owner presents.

Louisiana’s Gov. Jindal is rated an A+ by the National Rifle Association, and he has opposed every sensible piece of gun control legislation in Louisiana. Last year, he signed two bills to expand gun rights in his state — one allowing people with concealed handgun permits to carry their weapons into restaurants that serve alcohol and another expanding Louisiana’s “stand your ground” law.

Like many of our Republican politicians, Jindal called President Barack Obama’s calls for stricter gun control “completely shameful” after a Dylann Roof killed nine people in Charleston, S.C., in June. But when a naturalized U.S. citizen from Kuwait opened fire here earlier this month, Jindal released a statement saying the incident “certainly looks like an act of terrorism” that “underscores the grave reality of the threat posed to us by radical Islamic terrorism every single day.” Now in his state, with another white right-winger behind the trigger, yet another mass shooting is simply a tragedy that needs prayers again.

When are we going to say enough is enough with guns?

Our country has no common-sense gun laws — and what few we had have been stripped away by lawmakers goaded by the NRA.

On consecutive days last week, two Republican senators, both of whom are hoping to be the next President, released videos in which they destroyed stuff. First, Rand Paul went at a pile of paper, which he said was the United States tax code, with fire, a wood chipper, and a chain saw. (He wore safety goggles—he may be against regulations, but he’s also an ophthalmologist.) The next day saw Lindsey Graham attacking his Samsung flip phone with a cleaver, a blender, and a golf club. He also dropped a concrete block on it, threw it off a roof, and doused it with lighter fluid and ignited it. These videos suggest that Fox News, which is co-hosting the first G.O.P. Presidential debate, in Cleveland, on August 6th, should have in place firm rules regarding props, and that, perhaps, extra fire marshals should be deployed. With sixteen declared candidates, there is already a crowd-control problem; now the campaign threatens to be defined by demolition.

It’s hard enough to be heard in a crowded room without having to compete with a man who ended the week in Laredo, Texas, so that he could inspect the border, professing, “They say it’s a great danger, but I have to do it.” (He added that, once he is elected, “the Hispanics” are “going to love Trump.”) It’s harder still when you’re trying not to offend his supporters. After Trump insulted Mexicans last month, Bush said that he was personally offended, but others were more cautious. Christie commented that although some of Trump’s remarks may be “inappropriate,” he is “a good guy.” Cruz said, “I think he speaks the truth.” But if Trump weren’t around would the other Republicans behave that much more responsibly?

To mount a Presidential campaign these days, you need just two people: a candidate and a wealthy donor. Or, in Trump’s case, just one: he is his own billionaire. And he is the unadorned face of American politics. 8/03/15 Read more at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/03/broken

9. Timothy Egan: Trump Is the Poison His Party Concocted

Trump is a byproduct of all the toxic elements Republicans have thrown into their brew over the last decade or so – from birtherism to race-based hatred of immigrants, from nihilists who shut down government to elected officials who shout “You lie!” at their commander in chief.

It was fine when all this crossing-of-the-line was directed at President Barack Obama or other Democrats. But now that the ugliness is intramural, Trump has forced party leaders to decry something they have not only tolerated, but encouraged.

Using the X-ray vision of his new glasses, Perry has correctly diagnosed the problem, and forecast the outcome. But that toxic mix has been just the tonic for his party for years, including Perry’s suggestion that Texas might have to secede. Obama was barely into his first months in office when Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “You lie!” at him in a joint session of Congress. For hurling that insult, Wilson was widely praised in conservative media circles.

Trump also stoked the humiliating lie about Obama’s citizenship. He began that crusade, he claimed, because so many Republicans still believe it and have encouraged him to keep it alive.

Now, the only way to trump Trump is to act like a fool in public. So Sen. Rand Paul, formerly seen raising good questions about national issues, fired up a chain saw and took it to the tax code a few days ago – a pathetic stunt. And there was Sen. Lindsey Graham, flummoxed by Trump’s exposing him as sycophant to a plutocrat, destroying his cellphone in a blender. It only made us long for the real thing: Dan Aykroyd’s Bass-O-Matic.

This early in an election cycle, polls don’t tell us anything. They aren’t predictive or especially useful. For example, at roughly this point in 2011, Barack Obama was a goner. With a net negative job approval rating, he was behind in key swing states and losing to a generic Republican in a nationwide matchup. But the election came, and the picture changed: Discontented Democrats returned to his corner, and the race tightened to a virtual tossup. With economic growth on his side, Barack Obama won, with a victory that matched those fundamentals.

With that said, if you’re going to pay attention to polls at this stage of the election, then national ones are more helpful than state-by-state rankings. Simply put, what’s true nationally tends to be true in the states as well. If a candidate holds an overall lead, then odds are good she holds it in swing states as well. By contrast, it’s hard to extrapolate from the other direction—a poll of swing states doesn’t tell us much about the national picture. In other words, whether Clinton is unpopular in three particular swing states is less important than whether she’s unpopular nationwide. As it stands, the most recent national poll—from the Washington Post and ABC News—shows her well-placed versus the other side. 7/27/15 Read more at http://www.slate.com/
articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/07/hillary_clinton_swing_state_polls_why_you_should_ignore_the_doomsayers.html

Fair Use Notice:

This site contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use,’ you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. “Go to Original” links are provided as a convenience to allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “Go to Original” links.

“I have a great relationship with the Mexican people. I have many people working for me – look at the job in Washington – I have many legal immigrants working with me. And many of them come from Mexico. They love me, I love them. And I’ll tell you something, if I get the nomination, I’ll win the Latino vote.” — Donald Trump. 7/08/15

“It’s July for God’s sakes! So a national poll is a lousy way, in my view, to determine who should be on the stage. And I quite frankly resent it.” —Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-NC). 7/10/15

“These are the same House Republicans who voted for a party leader who once described himself as ‘David Duke without the baggage.’ These are the same congressional Republicans who have declined to criticize the race-baiting rhetoric of a leading Republican presidential candidate.” — White House press secretary Josh Earnest criticizing House Republicans on Thursday for fumbling passage of an annual spending bill by linking it to a debate over protecting the Confederate flag. 7/09/15

“I’m going to speak out against the uncontrollable use of guns in our country because I believe we can do better.” Hillary Clinton, who is vowing to fight the NRA 7/09/15

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.” — Donald Trump, who is still not convinced President Obama was born in America. 7/09/15

“It’s July for God’s sakes. So a national poll is a lousy way, in my view, to determine who should be on the stage. And I quite frankly resent it.” — Sen. Lindsey Graham. 7/10/15

“The committee has issued several subpoenas, but I have not sought to make them public. I would not make this one public now, but after Secretary Clinton falsely claimed the committee did not subpoena her, I have no choice in order to correct the inaccuracy.” — Benghazi Committee Chair Trey Gowdy who couldn’t wait to get out the news that Clinton said she hadn’t been subpoenaed for the email on her personal server when they’ve got evidence — a subpoena signed by the House clerk — that says otherwise. 7/09/15

VERSUS

The problem for Gowdy is that Clinton clearly wasn’t responding to the question of whether she’d ever been subpoenaed by the Benghazi Committee but whether she’d been subpoenaed before she deleted the emails from her server. A review of the videotape makes it clear that Clinton was speaking specifically to whether she’d erased email to evade a subpoena. — Jonathan Allen in Vox. 7/09/15

The call lasted about 45 minutes, the donors said, and Priebus was cordial, updating Trump on the party and the primary calendar while also urging him to “tone it down” — a phrase used repeatedly by those with knowledge of the exchange. Priebus told Trump that making inroads with Hispanics is one of his central missions as chairman. He told Trump that tone matters greatly and that Trump’s comments are more offensive than he might imagine with that bloc. — Karen Tumulty, Philip Rucker and Robert Costa in the Washington Post 7/08

“Workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we are going to get out of this rut that we’re in.” — Jeb Bush to the The New Hampshire Union-Leader editorial board. 7/09/15

VERSUS

“Unfortunately Gov. Bush does not seem to understand what is happening in our economy today. The sad truth is that because the middle class has declined over the last 40 years, while almost all new income and wealth have gone to the people on top, Americans already work the longest hours of any people in the western industrialized world. In fact, 80 percent of working men work longer than 40 hours a week. What we need now is an economy that provides decent wages and income for the middle class, not demands that people work even longer hours than they currently do.” — Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) responding to Bush’s comments. 7/09/15

“Senator, we had Speaker John Boehner on. He said he came to Congress with you and that he characterized you by saying that there’s not a tax increase that you haven’t liked. What is your response to that? He says you’re out of the mainstream of America.” — John Dickerson, host of CBS’s Face The Nation 7/12/15

VERSUS

“All right. Well, let me respond to that issue by issue. And you determine who is out of the mainstream.

I want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. A recent “Wall Street Journal” poll said a majority of the American people want to do that. John Boehner is not going to bring up any legislation in the House to raise the minimum wage at all. And many of his members want to do away with the concept of the minimum wage.

I want to see this country expand Social Security benefits, not cut them. John Boehner, his party want to either privatize Social Security or cut Social Security benefits to the elderly and disabled vets. The American people say overwhelmingly we have got to expand Social Security benefits by lifting the cap on taxable incomes.

– “I congratulate President Obama, Secretary [John] Kerry and the leaders of other major nations for producing a comprehensive agreement to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

– “We should applaud President Obama, Secretary Kerry, and Secretary Moniz for getting this done, and proceed with wisdom and strength in enforcing this deal to the fullest and in meeting the broader Iranian challenge.” — Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Calculations by The New Scientist say it’s too late to stop a 16-foot rise in sea levels, and without drastic cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions – more drastic than any being discussed ahead of the critical climate meeting in Paris later this year – a rise of over 65 feet will soon be unavoidable. Scientists consulted by the magazine say two melting glaciers in Antarctica are expected to raise sea levels 1.2 meters—4 feet—all on their own. Additional melting from the polar ice caps can bring those numbers even higher. 6/10/15 More at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630253.300-latest-numbers-show-at-least-5-metres-sealevel-rise-locked-in.html

9. Trump In Phoenix: Mexicans Are Coming To Take Your Jobs And Kill You

12. The Best Way to Vilify Hillary Clinton? G.O.P. Spends Heavily to Test It

In rooms around the country, an expensive and sophisticated effort is underway to test and refine the most potent lines of attack against Mrs. Clinton, and, ultimately, to persuade Americans that she does not deserve their votes. While the general election is 16 months away, Republican groups are eager to begin building a powerful case against the woman they believe will be the Democratic nominee, and to infuse the public consciousness with those messages.”

14. Live Action Puts Out Another Titillating but Misleading Video About Planned Parenthood

The conservative media is aflutter thinking it has a “gotcha” against Planned Parenthood: a video supposedly exposing the organization for “selling” fetal body parts, which is against the law. The video, created by a group called the Center for Medical Progress but distributed and promoted by Live Action, shows Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services Deborah Nucatola at a lunch meeting with people who apparently pretended to be medical research organizers seeking donated fetal tissue.

15. Republicans Are Acting Like Democrats. Democrats Are Acting Like Republicans.

“You know the difference in Democrats and Republicans?” Bill Clinton said in a 2003 speech. “In every presidential election, Democrats want to fall in love. Republicans just fall in line.”

But this year, the historical trend has reversed itself. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is the only candidate with any endorsements from current governors or U.S. senators and representatives. And she has a boatload of them: 88 representatives, 27 senators and two governors have endorsed Clinton, giving her 243 endorsement points, the highest figure ever at this stage of the race for a Democrat.

The surge in support for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in 2016 is the latest evidence of a progressive populist wave growing across America that has the potential to create a new political majority in the tradition of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy.

The rise of Sanders and the challenges and opportunities it creates for Hillary Clinton are the great story in presidential politics, while a gaggle of GOP candidates competes to move America backward.

The prospect of this new era of new thinking from a new populism of a new left, following the Gilded Age corruptions of the last financial crash and the revolving door corruptions of Washington, is driving the surprise surge for Sanders and posing the dramatic test for Clinton.

If Clinton can conquer her penchant for calculation and caution, she can ultimately ride the wave, lead the movement and become a transforming president. If she proves to be a polyester populist, the Sanders summer will continue into fall and Clinton, whether she ultimately loses or backs into the presidency, will miss her moment to achieve a mandate for greatness.

The right offers an anger-ridden vision of which Americans should be pushed down or locked out, while the left offers an uplifting vision that every citizen should have an equal share of the American Dream.

It has been amusing to watch the brands — the PGA, NBC, Macy’s, NASCAR, Univision, Serta — flee Donald Trump after his xenophobic remarks. Who even knew The Donald had a line of mattresses featuring Cool Action Dual Effects Gel Memory Foam?

But there is one entity that can’t dump Trump, no matter how hard it tries: the GOP. The Republican Party can’t dump Trump because Trump is the Republican Party.

One big Republican donor this week floated to the Associated Press the idea of having candidates boycott debates if the tycoon is onstage. Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham and other candidates have lined up to say, as Rick Perry put it, that “Donald Trump does not represent the Republican Party.”

But Trump has merely held up a mirror to the GOP. The man, long experience has shown, believes in nothing other than himself. He has, conveniently, selected the precise basket of issues that Republicans want to hear about — or at least a significant proportion of Republican primary voters. He may be saying things more colorfully than others when he talks about Mexico sending rapists across the border, but his views show that, far from being an outlier, he is hitting all the erogenous zones of the GOP electorate.

It’s officially bed-wetting season in the political world when it comes to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. With stories this week in Politico and The New York Times about the newly competitive Democratic primary, the whispers have begun about whether this is 2008 all over again. Back then, Clinton was defeated by Obama, an insurgent, progressive outsider.

But, Hillary Clinton circa 2015 is not Hillary Clinton circa 2008.

Her first campaign was beset by timidity, dissension and constant changes in strategy in reaction to the D.C conventional wisdom du jour. In Obama headquarters, we would shake our heads in bemusement at some of her campaign’s decisions as we realized it was either using an outdated playbook or no playbook at all.

Her campaign this time has been disciplined, cohesive and bold. Sure there are tactical things they could have done differently, but they have a smart strategy and are executing it with a precision that reminds me of the Obama campaign in 2008.

For all the contretemps about emails, speeches and roped-off reporters, elections are about fundamentals and the fundamentals point to a decisive if hard fought victory for Clinton.

4. Sean Illing: Fox News built a f**ked-up Frankenstein, dumb, angry and divorced from facts. Now Donald Trump will devour them

Fox News –and the conservative media-industrial complex – have created a Frankenstein. His name is Donald Trump, and his political success is now a huge problem for the Republican Party. In so many ways, Trump’s political existence was inevitable. For years, Fox News and the conservative talk radio machine have played to the populist Tea Party id: fomenting fear, demonizing immigrants, and enabling every nativist anxiety imaginable. Now they’re paying the price.

Donald Trump is practically a mirror image of the Fox News psyche. Most of his speeches consist of repackaged stupidities plucked right out of the conservative mediascape. It’s kind of brilliant, really. Trump knows his audience, and he beams back at them every idiotic thing they want to hear. Which, of course, is exactly what Fox News does.

The wonderful irony of all this is that the conservative media have ruined conservative politics, far more than liberals ever did. And the results speak for themselves. It’s true that Fox News has promoted the conservative brand and very likely energized grass-roots conservatism in some sense, but at what cost? The GOP, increasingly, is no longer a national party – it’s confined more and more to the South and to pockets of rural America.

It will be fascinating to watch how Fox News handles Trump, particularly as we move along in the process. It will be a delicate balancing act. The longer Trump hangs around, the more ridiculous the Republicans look. At the same time, Trump is a boon for ratings; the delightful dolts on Fox and Friends can’t get enough of him. Which makes perfect sense. The right-wing media machine – led by Fox News – has created a demand for his insane ramblings. As the chief supplier, Fox News has an interest in covering Trump, in extending his ruse for as long as possible.

Promoting Trump is a disaster for the GOP, though. His bombast, left unchecked, will undermine the Republican primaries and jeopardize their shot at the White House. How Fox News manages Trump’s ascendance will therefore tell you all you need to know (if you didn’t already) about where their loyalties lie.

5. Paul Krugman: Greece’s Economy Is a Lesson for Republicans in the U.S.

Greece has played an outsized role in U.S. political debate, as a symbol of the terrible things that will supposedly happen — any day now — unless we stop helping the less fortunate and printing money to fight unemployment. And Greece does indeed offer important lessons to the rest of us. But they’re not the lessons you think, and the people most likely to deliver a Greek-style economic disaster here in America are the very people who love to use Greece as a boogeyman.

On one side, just about everyone in the G.O.P. demands that we reduce government spending, especially aid to lower-income families. (They also, of course, want to reduce taxes on the rich — but that wouldn’t do much to boost demand for U.S. products.)

On the other side, leading Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan incessantly attack the Federal Reserve for its efforts to boost the economy, delivering solemn lectures on the evils of “debasing” the dollar — when the main difference between the effects of austerity in Canada and in Greece was precisely that Canada could “debase” its currency, while Greece couldn’t. Oh, and many Republicans hanker for a return to the gold standard, which would effectively put us into a euro-like straitjacket.

A few minutes before my meeting with Hillary Clinton on the Fourth of July, during my drive to the Mount Washington hotel in Bretton Woods, N.H., where she was staying, I passed a moose near the side of the road. At first I thought it was fake, one of those life-size cutouts that you sometimes see of big land mammals or, on occasion, famous politicians. But the specimen proved to be real and spectacular, antlers and all. I had never seen a moose before. It was thrilling, and I felt compelled to tell Clinton about it within seconds of my arrival. ‘‘Oh, really? Wow,’’ Clinton exclaimed with a big smile as she poured herself a cup of coffee. She might have been humoring me, but still seemed genuinely excited by my sighting and seized on it as a point of connection.

We were meeting in an old conference room of the grand hotel, which is perhaps best known to history as the site of the Bretton Woods Conference, a gathering of delegates from 44 countries to regulate the international financial system after World War II. Clinton and I sat at the same table where the agreement that established the International Monetary Fund was signed in 1944. As a former first lady, senator and secretary of state, Clinton was of course no stranger to such heady sites of statecraft. But what we started talking about was the moose. She had seen a few in her day, she told me. ‘‘I’ve eaten moose, too,’’ she said. ‘‘I’ve had moose stew.’’

Clinton explained that during college she worked one summer in Alaska, washing dishes at a resort. She was 21, and her energy and freedom felt limitless; she took long hikes in the midnight sun. ‘‘The guides told us the most dangerous animals in the park — more than the grizzlies, because the grizzlies will basically ignore you — were the moose,’’ she said. Natives knew to keep their distance. But the moose were all over, impossible to miss. ‘‘Oh, I mean like, between you and me,’’ Clinton said, and I thought for a second she was about to tell me something conspiratorial (‘‘between you and me’’), but in fact she was simply describing how close she had been to a moose, roughly the same distance as we were sitting from each other there at the birthplace of the I.M.F.

Hillary Clinton is private and guarded by nature, and three decades of being inspected like an exotic species has made her even more so. But right now, in the early days of what will be a 19-month campaign for the White House, she is trying to share and expound on her experiences, to project some greater measure of herself, big and small. Moose tales aside, this does not come easily. She has resided at the center of so many scandals, psychodramas and culture wars that it’s hard to even keep track of them all, let alone know what the person within that bubble of attention is actually like.
7/17/15 More at http://ift.tt/1HwAGop

That last component marks an important evolution in presidential politics. For at least the past several decades, Democrats seeking national office have often been timid on the issue of guns for fear of alienating firearms owners. In 2008, after Barack Obama took heat for his gaffe about people who “cling to guns or religion,” he rarely mentioned guns again — neither that year nor in his 2012 reelection campaign.

But in a sign that the political environment on guns has shifted in the wake of recent mass shootings — and of Clinton’s determination to stake out liberal ground in her primary race against insurgent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — Clinton is not only initiating a debate about gun control but also vowing to fight the National Rifle Association.

“I’m going to speak out against the uncontrollable use of guns in our country because I believe we can do better,” Clinton said Tuesday in Iowa City.

In many ways, the most boring question about Sanders’ candidacy is the horse-race question. What are his odds of defeating an extraordinarily smart and driven opponent with 100 percent name recognition, more White House experience than arguably anyone who has ever run for the office and access to obscene amounts of money (Clinton’s campaign has vowed to raise $2 billion) — plus, of course, the thrilling possibility of offering voters the chance to make history once again and elect the first female president? I’d say pretty slim!

Sanders, though, believes these odds only hold true if the existing electoral reality remains unchanged — which is to say, extremely low voter turnout, a focus on personality rather than issues, and the rank corruption of outside campaign spending. So the far more interesting question becomes: Does Sanders have a shot at changing what have come to be accepted as the fundamentals of modern presidential campaigning? If you are willing to risk sounding naive or unsophisticated and entertain the notion, as Sanders does, that it’s possible to upend the system entirely if you mobilize enough grassroots support, well, then, who knows? Seven years ago, Barack Obama broke all previous records when it came to small-donor fundraising and African-American voter turnout. Sanders looks to the way activism by fast-food workers agitating for a $15 minimum wage, a demand taken seriously by very few members of the elite early on, has entirely changed the national debate on what a living wage should be (and has actually become law in major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle).

To that end, Sanders, as much as possible, wants to disassociate his own ego from this most egocentric of public exercises and exploit the platform given presidential candidates in order to tantalize voters with a heretofore unoffered possibility of true radical change. “The evolution of American politics has resulted in a major, multibillion-dollar effort to tell the American people the government can’t do anything for you, and you should pin all of your hope and faith on corporate America and Wall Street,” Sanders tells me. “I often say, ‘You should think about why the Koch brothers are going to spend a billion dollars in this campaign. If they think politics is pretty important, maybe you should as well.’ ” 7/09/15 More at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/weekend-with-bernie-sanders-20150709

9. Paul Waldman: The next GOP president won’t walk away from the Iran deal. Here’s why.

For now, there are two questions that every Republican who opposes this deal must be asked: First, what’s your alternative? And second, can you explain exactly how your alternative would prevent Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon? Policy choices don’t exist in a vacuum. Whenever we say that one course of action is problematic, we’re saying that another course would be better. As far as I can tell (though it isn’t easy to figure out since they’re so vague on this question), the Republican position is that we should have walked away from these negotiations and just…wait. Then after some undetermined period, Iran would come crawling back and give us everything we could ever want, without the need for any negotiations at all.

No one in his or her right mind actually believes that would happen, of course. And if conservatives are right that Iran is hell-bent on getting a nuclear weapon, if the entire deal actually fell apart, there would be no reason for them not to ramp up their nuclear program with all deliberate speed. At which point, Republicans would say we have no choice but to launch military action. So the people who brought you the Iraq War would be sending us into another war in the Middle East, which would no doubt turn out just as splendidly.

All of this isn’t to say that every provision of this deal is exactly what we would have wanted. But that’s the nature of negotiation — you seldom get everything you want, but if it goes well, what you do get is better than the alternative. At the moment Republicans can’t articulate their own alternative, because it sure seems like that alternative is another war. But if they’re fortunate enough to win the White House next year, they’re likely to find that walking away from this deal is a lot less attractive than it seemed when they were trying to win over Republican primary voters. 7/14/15 More at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/07/14/the-next-gop-president-wont-walk-away-from-the-iran-deal-heres-why/

Fair Use Notice:

This site contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use,’ you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. “Go to Original” links are provided as a convenience to allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “Go to Original” links.

“For Democrats, Donald Trump amounts to a kind of divine intervention. With the Republican Party on an urgent mission to woo Latino voters, one of its leading presidential candidates has been enmeshed for two weeks in a nasty feud over his inflammatory comments about Mexican immigrants.” — Philip Rucker in the Washington Post. 7/01/15

“Thank you so much for your support for the GLT community. This is the first time in my 24.5 year career that I have seen this type of support. I appreciate all the hard work you have done in the short time as Secretary of State. You have given so much hope to so many. I am so proud of you and your work. May God continue to bless you.”–A letter from a State Department employee to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who was dedicated to expanding gay rights both domestically and abroad from the beginning of her term.

“You still love him. He’s still a member of your family. Right? But you’ve got to correct him. You don’t want to put him in charge of stuff.” — Barack Obama likening Governor Scott Walker and the “bus full” of Republican candidates to an “Uncle Harry” at Thanksgiving dinner who says something that makes no sense. 7/02/15

“Just like the simple question asked of Jeb on Iraq — where it took him five days and multiple answers to get right — he doesn’t understand anything about the border or border security. In fact, Jeb believes illegal immigrants who break our laws when they cross our border come ‘out of love.’” — Donald Trump on Jeb Bush’s immigration stance. 7/06/15

“I salute Donald Trump for focusing on the need to address illegal immigration. The Washington cartel doesn’t want to address that. The Washington cartel doesn’t believe we need to secure the borders. The Washington cartel supports amnesty and I think amnesty’s wrong, and I salute Donald Trump for focusing on it.” —Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) aligning himself with Donald Trump. 7/05/15

“And that’s why what Rand Paul has done to make this country weaker and more vulnerable is a terrible thing, and for him to raise money off of it is disgraceful. It’s disgraceful.” — Gov. Chris Christie criticizing Sen Paul’s role in forcing the expiration of the Patriot Act. 7/06/15

“I’ve been in law enforcement 55 years. I think I know a fraudulent, fake document. I’m not a computer expert. I rely on my people. But I’m pretty well convinced it’s a fake document.” — Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio agreeing with Donald Trump that President Obama’s birth certificate is forged. 7/05/15

“If you look at politics as a baseball game or a football game, then I’m supposed to be telling the people that my opponents are the worst people in the world and I’m great. That’s crap; I don’t believe that for a second…. I don’t need to spend my life attacking Hillary Clinton or anybody else. I want to talk about my ideas on the issues.” — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) 7/06/15

In the second quarter of 2015, Democrats regained an advantage over Republicans in terms of Americans’ party affiliation. A total of 46% of Americans identified as Democrats (30%) or said they are independents who lean toward the Democratic Party (16%), while 41% identified as Republicans (25%) or leaned Republican (16%). The two parties were generally even during the previous three quarters, including the fourth quarter of 2014, when the midterm elections took place. 702/15 Read more at http://www.gallup.com/poll/183887/democrats-regain-edge-party-affiliation.aspx

2. The DAILY GRILL

“Back in April, Gov. Paul LePage stood up at a monthly breakfast forum and told the crowd that seniors had demanded he stop the minimum wage from going up.” — Bangor Daily News 702/15

VERSUS

“Two months later, on June 26, his office sent reporter Amy Browne the results of her Freedom of Access Act request: two emails. Neither email cited the specific and personal sort of concerns that LePage raised in his talk.” — Bangor Daily News 702/15

4. Hoping For A Republican President In 2017 Republicans Block Dozens Of Obama Judge Picks

The GOP-controlled Senate is on track this year to confirm the fewest judges since 1969, a dramatic escalation of the long-running partisan feud over the ideological makeup of federal courts.

Republicans appear willing to absorb criticism that they’re interfering with the prerogative of a president to pick his nominees in the hopes that the GOP can get its own judges installed in 2017, with one of their own in the White House. In the meantime, federal courts could be left with dozens of unfilled vacancies. More than two dozen federal courts have declared “judicial emergencies” because of excessive caseloads caused by vacancies. 7/06/15 Read more at http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/payback-gop-blocks-obama-judge-picks-judiciary-119743.html

5. Who makes the debate stage — and who doesn’t?

With the first GOP presidential debate now less than a month from now and with the first debate is restricted to the top 10, one of author crunched the numbers from the last five national polls (two from Fox, one CNN, one NBC/WSJ, and one from Monmouth) with the following results:

Hillary is still ahead in Iowa by at least 19 points, a much wider margin than exists in the GOP race.

Sanders’ surge is being fueled by progressive whites — the same folks who supported Bill Bradley in 2000 and Howard Dean in 2004. In fact, what Sanders has done is consolidate the 30% who were there for Elizabeth Warren. (What should concern Clinton Land is if he starts creeping up into the 40s).

And as the political scientists put it, the party (though its elected officials) ultimately decide the nomination. And so far, two-thirds of sitting Democratic senators have endorsed Hillary. That, to political scientists, matters more than the polls or crowd sizes.

Sanders has consolidated the progressive wing of the party, and that is impressive. The question is: Can he grow it? And remember, a recent Gallup poll showed that a presidential candidate being labeled a socialist was the worst attribute — lower than being a Muslim or an atheist. And for Sanders to TRULY take off, he needs to prove to Democratic elites that a socialist like him could win a general election. http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/how-donald-trump-helps-also-hurts-jeb-bush-n387901

8. Hillary Shreds The Republicans’ Benghazi Hoax With Devastating Ad

In this video, Hillary Clinton’s campaign strikes back against the Republican muckraking campaign that has been fruitlessly attempting to frame her for the 2012 terrorist attacks at the American Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, by militants affiliated with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The FOX News echo chamber and congressional Republicans have seized on the Benghazi issue as a way to smear Clinton’s credentials and undermine her foreign policy experience.

Mr. Trump is important for two reasons: first for the damage he can do to the Republican Party, and second for the useful lesson he can teach that same party. The potential damage comes largely in the harm he can do—indeed, already may have done—to Republicans’ crucial mission of building better bridges to Hispanics. The lesson comes by way of illustrating the depths of populist anger running through sectors of the GOP right now. 7/06/15 Read more at http://politicalwire.com/2015/07/06/two-reasons-not-to-dismiss-donald-trump/

1. Jonathan Chait: Why Are Conservatives Defending Donald Trump?

It is not politically significant that Donald Trump would claim to be running for president, that he would say something flamboyantly ignorant, or that he would “surge” to “second place” in polls by using his name recognition to get into double digits in a splintered field. What is significant and genuinely disturbing, not to mention poisonous to the Republican Party’s electoral interests, is the fact that conservative thought leaders feel compelled to defend Trump’s nativist ramblings. And not just bottom-feeding outlets like the Daily Caller and Breitbart, either. National Review editor Rich Lowry writes in Politico that Trump “has a point.”

In his announcement speech, Trump began by denouncing Mexico as an economic competitor, then shifted from protectionism to nativism by portraying Mexican immigrants as criminals:

This demagoguery would be merely comic if it were not being defended by respectable figures like Lowry. The National Review editor hardly offers a full-scale defense, but instead cleverly insists we must acknowledge the nuggets of wisdom in Trump’s ravings.

“This,” President Obama said in the Rose Garden on Wednesday as he announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba, “is what change looks like.”

This echo of his 2008 campaign theme was self-congratulatory but deserved, coming at a time of unexpected hope late in his presidency. In the space of just over a week, Obama’s tired tenure came back to life. He bested congressional Democrats and got trade legislation on his desk. The Supreme Court upheld the signature achievement of his presidency — Obamacare — and thereby cemented his legacy.

The high court also made same-sex marriage legal across the land following a tidal change in public opinion that Obama’s own conversion accelerated. Had the court’s decisions not dominated the nation’s attention, Obama’s eulogy Friday for those slain in a South Carolina church, and his extraordinary rendition of “Amazing Grace,” would have itself been one of the most powerful moments of his presidency.

It is little surprise, then, that this lame duck’s job approval rating hit a respectable 50 percent this week for the first time in two years in a CNN poll, and his disapproval rating dropped to 47.

Here’s the bad news for Chris Christie: He embarks on a presidential campaign with hardly any support among primary voters. He might not even make it onstage for the first debate, because unlike four years ago, when conservative donors were begging Christie to offer himself up as not Mitt Romney, there are at least 15 other Republicans vying for position.

But here’s the good news for Christie, if you want to be glass-half-full about it: At least he’s not running for reelection as governor. Because with a 30 percent approval rating in New Jersey, Christie is now less popular in his home state than his predecessor, Jon Corzine, whom he beat pretty much by just showing up and having a pulse. If Christie takes a liking to bucolic New Hampshire, he might consider moving there.

When you’ve made yourself a divisive figure at home in hopes of uniting Republicans hundreds or thousands of miles away, it’s hard to be taken seriously as the kind of governor who can win a general election, like Clinton or Bush.

With the Republican Party on an urgent mission to woo Latino voters, one of its leading presidential candidates has been enmeshed for two weeks in a nasty feud over his inflammatory comments about Mexican immigrants.

The comments — and many more since — have prompted an uproar among Latino groups and acrimonious breakups between Trump and various corporate partners. His outlandish rhetoric and skill at occupying the national spotlight are also proving to be dangerously toxic for the GOP brand, which remains in the rehabilitation stage after losing the 2012 presidential race.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and other Democrats, meanwhile, are eager to make Trump the face of the Republican Party, which is momentarily leaderless with a disparate presidential field and no clear front-runner.

I heard what you said about the kind of people you think Latino immigrants are — people with problems, who bring drugs, crime and rape to America. While your comments are incredibly ignorant and racist, I don’t want to spend my time chastising you. I’ll leave that to your business partners like Univision and NBC, who have the power to scold you where it hurts. Instead, I’m writing to say thank you!

You have made your thoughts on the Latino community clear and you continue to stand by them. And in return, we will do more than tweet about our indignation and beat piñatas of your likeness. We will silence you at the polls. We will vote and use our growing position in U.S. politics. Our fellow Americans who understand and value our contributions will join us. We know there is nothing that scares you more.

The truth is, Mr. Trump, that your comments mean that you fail to see that immigrants are what have made this nation. They are at the core of our ideals, and they are the foundation that keeps us afloat. No, Mr. Trump, you may not reduce us to drug dealers and rapists. We are moms and dads, sons and daughters. We are valedictorians and honor students. We are college graduates, bankers, police officers, entertainers, teachers, journalists, politicians and we are the future of America.

Thank you for helping us in our work to energize the Latino vote and to usher in our shared future! Keep it up!

Democratic primaries have always featured liberal insurgent candidates, but perhaps none quite so liberal or insurgent as the socialist senator from Vermont. Sanders’ comments are a reminder of just how far the second-place Democratic presidential candidate stands from the American mainstream on some issues, and the looming reckoning Democrats face with their party’s leftward drift.

Never mind whether Sanders can crack 40 percent in any primary against Hillary Clinton — he has already established himself as her de facto challenger and a standard-bearer of a party that was, until this year, too far to the right for his liking.

“When I hear Bernie talk I’m almost inclined to accuse him of plagiarizing me,” said Ralph Nader, the left-wing gadfly whose third-party bid many Democrats still blame for swinging the 2000 election to George W. Bush.

Nader’s kinship with Sanders is yet another sign that the Democratic Party’s goal posts have moved left. The percentage of Democrats who identify as socially and economically liberal has increased 17 points since 2001, according to a recent Gallup poll. And the party’s restive liberal base — led in recent years by progressive icon Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — has pushed the party establishment on social issues like same-sex marriage and populist economic ones like equal pay and paid sick leave. 7/06/15 Read more at: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-socialist-surge-119785.html

7. Jamelle Bouie: The GOP Base Loves Trump

Just because Trump is an unqualified vanity candidate doesn’t mean he’s unimportant in the story of the 2016 GOP presidential primary. Unlike Chris Christie or Mike Huckabee—two vastly more legitimate candidates—Trump is popular with Republican voters. A new CNN national poll puts him in second place in the GOP field at 12 percent support—seven points behind the leader, Jeb Bush—while recent polls from Iowa and New Hampshire also show him with a second place spot in those crucial early contests. If Trump holds his position, he’ll be on stage with Bush, Scott Walker, and Marco Rubio when official debates start in August (he could even lose some support and still make the cut).

The obvious question is “Why?”—why does Trump have a hold on this thick slice of the members of the Republican base? The answer is, unlike the professional politicians in the race, Trump is—from his views on immigration to the “issue” of Obama’s citizenship—one of them.

Trump doesn’t just represent the Republican base on immigration. He is the Republican base on immigration. His anxieties are their anxieties. And his rhetoric—a revanchist stew of foreign policy belligerence, small government ideology, anti-elite agitation, and raw bigotry—reflects and appeals to a meaningful part of the Republican electorate.

The good news is that this meaningful part is still a small minority of the Republican Party. The right-wing of American populism might be ugly and angry, but it’s not powerful. The bad news, on the other hand, is that you don’t have to be a majority to be influential. You just have to grab the right influence at the right time. Trump is a distraction, but don’t be surprised if a more credible candidate—like Walker, who can cloak his hard-right politics in suburban blandness—tries to bring Trump’s voters to his side. Alone, these voters won’t bring victory. But in a close fight, they could offer the winning points. 7/01/15 Read more at http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/07/cnn_trump_poll_why_republicans_love_donald_trump.html

8. Juan Williams: A rising tide for Dems on green issues

If you think the most politically powerful decision out of the Supreme Court in recent weeks was on gay marriage or ObamaCare, think again.

It was the 5-4 win for conservatives when the court rejected Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules limiting pollution from power plants.

An intense fight over the environment is now certain to be a dominant feature of the 2016 presidential race. The fight will be fueled by President Obama’s willingness in his last months in office – during the campaign – to defy the court and risk new EPA restrictions on emission of greenhouse gases to stop global warming.

That’s a winning position in a GOP primary. But with the Pope against you and nearly half the voters saying global warming is a “serious issue,” it is a suicidal stand for a general election candidate.

This site contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use,’ you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. “Go to Original” links are provided as a convenience to allow for verification of authenticity. However, as originating pages are often updated by their originating host sites, the versions posted may not match the versions our readers view when clicking the “Go to Original” links.